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Brevity is the soul of wit. -- William Shakespeare
Brevity is a great charm of eloquence. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Brevity is the soul of lingerie. -- Dorothy Parker
Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.... -- Hosea Ballou
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying "I love you. -- Judith Viorst
Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity. -- Antonio Porchia
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story. -- Annie Proulx
Be sincere; be brief; be seated. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Brevity - the sister of talent. -- Anton Chekhov
Brevity is the soul of lingerie -- Dorothy Parker
Brevity is the soul of wit -- William Shakespeare
Brevity is a great charm of eloquence -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
A parsimony of words prodigal of sense. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction. -- Hosea Ballou
I strive to be brief, and I become obscure. -- Baltasar Gracian
We must be brief when traitors brave the field. -- William Shakespeare
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity. -- William Zinsser
Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal. -- Rudolf Virchow
Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest. -- Theophile Gautier
Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said. -- Georg C. Lichtenberg
There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on. -- Horace
When I struggle to be terse, I end by being obscure. -- Horace
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it? -- Stephen King
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
[S]ince brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. -- William Shakespeare
The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you're inclined to say, "in other words.... -- Robert Breault
Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. This above all: to thine own self be true. No legacy is so rich as honesty. Brevity is the soul of wit -- William Shakespeare
Brevity is the soul of command. Too much talking suggests desperation on the part of the leader. Speak shortly, decisively and to the pointâ??and couch your desires in such natural logic that no one can raise objections. Then move on. -- Cyrus the Great
On the Brevity of Our TiesTies in this world last only for a time. We are husband and wife, parent and child, for a short period only. Once this reality sinks in, we cannot help treasuring each moment of our brief association. -- Kentetsu Takamori
One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store. Brevity is very important. If you're going to be longwinded, it should be for a purpose. Not just because you like your words. -- Patricia Marx
My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. -- William Shakespeare
Realize that illness and other temporal setbacks often come to us from the hand of God our Lord, and are sent to help us know ourselves better, to free ourselves of the love of created things, and to reflect on the brevity of this life and, thus, to prepare ourselves for the life which is without end. -- Ignatius of Loyola
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. -- John Ruskin
In labouring to be concise, I become obscure -- Horace
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins. -- Michael Winter
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity. -- Mohsin Hamid
Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy. -- Ali Smith
There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do. -- Richard Dawkins
Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem. -- Maxine Hong Kingston
Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes 'good' from 'bad' luck. -- Karen Russell
With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. -- Walter Pater
After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.' -- Anthony Marra
Realize that illness and other temporal setbacks often come to us from the hand of God our Lord, and are sent to help us know ourselves better, to free ourselves of the love of created things, and to reflect on the brevity of this life and, thus, to prepare ourselves for the life which is without end. -- Ignatius of Loyola
Aiming at brevity, I become obscure. -- Horace
Freedom is the brevity to resist detrimental act. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity. -- Katherine Cecil Thurston
My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. -- William Zinsser
You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood. -- Hector Hugh Munro
Let us return to 'no'. It has the charm of brevity. -- Sharon Lee
In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity. -- Pliny the Younger
The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life. -- Billy Graham
The brevity of life is grace to walk on your own path. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
The brevity of life is the grace to walk on your own path. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity. -- Martial
Let those who thoughtfully consider the brevity of life remember the length of eternity. -- Thomas Ken
The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat. -- Shirley Geok-lin Lim
For the sake of brevity, we will always represent this number 2.718281828459... by the letter e. -- Leonhard Euler
If human lives be, for their very brevity, sweet, then beast lives are sweeter still... -- Isobelle Carmody
Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through -- Mohsin Hamid
If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it. -- Michael R. Burch
Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life -- Protagoras
Filter your pain through the brevity of this life and the unending beauty of the next. -- Max Lucado
...when a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor. -- William Strunk, Jr.
This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures. -- Rudyard Kipling
Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit....They have to fit in context. -- James J. Kilpatrick
This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity. -- Brandon Sanderson
it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end. -- Winifred Holtby
It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke. -- Maureen Johnson
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes. -- Iris Murdoch
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality. -- Russell Baker
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. -- Yevgeny Zamyatin
A great many people who spend their time mourning over the brevity of life could make it seem longer if they did a little more work. -- Don Marquis
He who writes distichs, wishes, I suppose, to please by brevity. But, tell me, of what avail is their brevity, when there is a whose book full of them? -- Martial
For effective communication, use brevity. Jesus said, 'Follow me.' Now that's brief! He could be brief because of all that he was that he didn't have to say. -- Jim Rohn
True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
youth, balancing itself upon hope, is forever in extremes: its expectations are continually aroused only to be baffled, and disappointment, like a summer shower, is violent in proportion to its brevity. -- Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking. -- Gerald R. Ford
The land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle and end. -- Craig Childs
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it. -- Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion. -- Anton Chekhov

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