Selected clarity quotes

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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

5. Without mathematics, we are blind.

6. 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.

7. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

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

9. Just when I nearly had the answer, I forgot the question.

10. If you have God on your side, everything becomes clear.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

14. Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

15. To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.

16. 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.

17. 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.

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

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

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

21. 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.

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

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.

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

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

28. 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.

29. I know on which side my bread is buttered.

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

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

34. 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.

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

36. 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.

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

38. 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.

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

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

41. Mysticism, to be viable, requires explicit instructions, which need suffer no more ambiguity or artifice in their exposition than we find in a manual for operating a lawn mower.[2]

42. In order to obtain the optimum view of what takes place in front of me, I should have to lower my eyes a little. But I lower my eyes no more. In a word, I only see what appears close beside me, what I best see I see ill.

43. One more night, God I've had to fight to keep my line of sight on what's real. One more day, I fear I've lost my way, I don't know how to say what I feel.

44. Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.

45. On the poor use of grammar It's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

46. 'No he has not been eliminated, you have to go over the top-rope and both feet must hit the arena floor' (repeated many times during Royal Rumble match)

47. 'Stop talking in riddles! Who's my son!?' (towards Mr. Johnson, the attorney for the mother of Mr. McMahon's illegitimate son)

48. The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.

49. A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are...

50. The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.

51. He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.

52. It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

53. I've read his environmental statement. It's very good, and I agree with it. Clark's environmental position is spelled out very well and it hits the important points. He handles the tough questions better than anyone else.

54. The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.

55. All I want to hear from you is Yes or No!

56. Before I leave, make sure everybody HEARD/Know I meant, EVERY MOTHERF**KIN WORD When we ride on our enemies

57. The style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us. After a time, falling into a passion with this indolent pleasure-loving temper in his readers, Ruskin checked his fountains, and curbed his speech to the very spirited, free and almost colloquial English in which Fors Clavigera and Praeterita are written. In these changes, and in the restless play of his mind upon one subject after another, there is something, we scarcely know how to define it, of the wealthy and cultivated amateur, full of fire and generosity and brilliance, who would give all he possesses of wealth and brilliance to be taken seriously, but who is fated to remain for ever an outsider.

58. What a clear world you live in. All the lines neatly drawn

59. Solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. I am better able to tell what in the world is wheat for me and what is chaff. In fact, my definition of success itself is changing. ~ Ch. 6

60. I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby - I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... 'Betrayal'... 'Confrontation'... 'Management'... My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.

61. It means what it says.

62. And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds. That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself Surely you see that.

63. Don't Make Assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

64. Hit the nail on the head.

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

66. Complexity is best expressed through simplicity.

67. I don't understand.

68. I beg your pardon?

69. What's THAT all about?

70. Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

71. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

72. The bullet is a mad thing; only the bayonet knows what it is about.

73. They certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard.

74. If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

75. Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

76. A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

77. 'Valttelevista lausunnoista on ymmarrettavasti syntynyt epajohdonmukainen kuva. Uskon, etta nyt esittamieni tietojen valossa muodostuu oikea kuva.' ('It's understandable that the avoiding statements have created an illogical image. I believe that the information I will now present will be helpful to form a correct image.')

78. Die Erinnerung wirkt wie das Sammlungsglas in der Camera obscura: Sie zieht alles zusammen und bringt dadurch ein viel schoneres Bild hervor, als sein Original ist.

79. For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

80. The law of simplicity and naivete applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. 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; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

81. Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

82. Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

83. A warrior thinks of death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that tempers our spirit.

84. I think one of the great, great problems... is confusing people to the point where they become immobile. In fact, the more things people can find out for themselves, the more vigor the organization is going to have.

85. Leave the acid kids in their green fishbowls today.

86. Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing, The sunlight bright on the green windowshade, And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing, Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing, When in the white bed all things are made.

87. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?

88. Ambiguity - the Devil's volleyball.

89. Poetry must be as well written as prose.

90. Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.

91. If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

92. Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams.

93. Laws are generally not understood by three sorts of persons, viz, by those who make them, by those who execute them, and by those who suffer if they break them.

94. 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.

95. While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.

96. I cannot say that I do not disagree with you.

97. True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.

98. Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

99. Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, - returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

100. Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles.