Brevity Quotes

Continued eloquence is wearisome.

[S]ince brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.

I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.

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.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.

Speak on, but be not over-tedious.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

We called him Barney for short. We couldn't use his real name, there wasn't time.

Eloquence: saying the proper thing and stopping.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

If I had more time, I would have written less.

Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.

It has seemed to be more necessary to have regard to the weight of words rather than to their number.

A word to the wise is enough, and many words won't fill a bushel.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

And a man's life's no more than to say "One."

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.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

More words ain't good for anything in the world only to bring on more argument.

Never miss a chance to shut up

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.