324 Clarity Quotes

Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant. It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness.

If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.

Did you hear that? I didn't hear anything. Put that question another way.

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Oh, rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.

I think it's very important for the American president to mean what he says. That's why I understand that the enemy could misread what I say. That's why I try to be as clearly as I can.

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I know on which side my bread is buttered.

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

If people take any notice of what we say, we say we've been through the drug scene, man, and there's nothing like being straight.

By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.

His words also were as distinct and true to the ear as those of a great singer, and he had Tennyson's splendid gift in this, that he never went back on his tracks to pick up the fallen loops of a sentence as commonplace talkers do. He would hesitate for an instant now and then, waiting for the right word, or would pause with a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest, but when he was through the sentence was perfect and entire, lacking nothing, and the word was so purely one with the man that when I read his books now and then I do not hear my own voice within my reading but the voice I heard that day.

I am as sober as a judge.

Distinction without a difference.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

First, I tell them what I am going to tell them, then I tell them, then I tell them what I told them.

'Afterwards, after the concert, I heard them say: 'Too much noise'. And I wanted to ask: 'Where, exactly?''

Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short. (A xviii)

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Art is science made clear.

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Though Truth and Falsehood be Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is.

Show me, dear Christ, Thy spouse, so bright and clear.

I feel like there was a fog in front of my eyes for 36 years, and the second [Lily-Rose] was born, that fog just lifted and everything became totally clear and focused. To say it's the greatest thing that's ever happened to me is the understatement of the century. Look at me, I've become a cliche. (1999)

Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.

It's a rather rude gesture, but at least it's clear what you mean.

The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word - like a lump of sugar in water. (p.183)

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. (464)

Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? - Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear? (p. 31e)

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it. (p. 42e)

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours.

A constitution should be short and obscure.

The battle is all over except the 'shouting' when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.

The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.

Truth and clarity are complementary.

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Turn up the lights - I don't want to go home in the dark.

The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.

Everything is self-evident.

When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear.

Scatter the clouds that hide The face of heaven, and show Where sweet peace doth abide, Where Truth and Beauty grow.

There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I'm inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.

God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing.

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

To the yoke of necessity every one willingly bows the head. Still, wherever an actually complicated aspect of things presents itself, it is more difficult to discover exactly what is necessary; but by the very acknowledgment of the principle, the problem invariably becomes simpler and the solution easier.

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

...impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer...

Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, / and clear in wanting

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. #109

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. #116

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood. #118

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. #120

Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse. 'Facilitate' is typical of the case. A generation ago only sissies and bureaucrats would have said 'facilitate' in public. Nowadays we are a nation of 'facilitate' utterers. 'Facilitate' is nothing more than a gout-ridden, overstuffed 'ease.' Why has 'ease' fallen into disuse among us? It is a lovely little bright snake of a word which comes hissing quietly off the tongue and carries us on, without fuss and French horns, to the object which is being eased. This is English at its very best. Easing is not one of the great events of life; it does not call for Beethoven; it is not an idea to get drunk on, to wallow in, to engage in multiple oleaginous syllabification until it becomes a pompous ass of a word like 'facilitate.'

Together with the puzzle, Mozart gives you the solution. ~ Ferruccio Busoni

Mozart's music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard. ~ Gabriel Faure

The works of Mozart may be easy to read, but they are very difficult to interpret. The least speck of dust spoils them. They are clear, transparent, and joyful as a spring, and not only those muddy pools which seem deep only because the bottom cannot be seen. ~ Wanda Landowska

I hate definitions.