Clarity Quotes

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence.

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

Distortion upon distortion: . . . the more one uses the mind, the more confused one becomes.

Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Be still and allow the mud to settle.

The garden of the world has no limits except in your mind. Its presence is more beautiful than the stars with more clarity than the polished mirror of your heart.

Genius seems to consistent merely in trueness of sight.

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

Love opens my chest, and thought returns to its confines.

Who is there who can make muddy waters clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will gradually clear itself.

Successful people move on their own initiative but they know where they are going before they start.

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.

I do not know what I think until I write it.

Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

Style is only the frame to hold your thoughts. It is like the sash of a window; if heavy, it will obscure the light.

Never use two words when one will do.

You must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

A person sometimes can't make a decision unless they know what decision to make.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home.

The minute a thing is long and complicated, it confuses. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments made 'em short. They may not always be kept, but they are understood.

Use the Light that dwells within you to regain your natural clarity of sight.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.

Discussion and argument are essential parts of science; the greatest talent is the ability to strip a theory until the simple basic idea emerges with clarity.

A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I'd realized what a hell I'd made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album.

It is better to live on the house top than to live in a house full of confusion.

You can't hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

If you can't summarize an issue on one page, you don't understand the issue well enough.

The best leaders are those who break that mission down into the organization's constituent parts, so that everybody understands their role and how it all builds into the whole.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

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

Negative thinking creates clouds at critical decision times.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.

When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.

If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

The whole end of speech is to be understood.

No man ever got lost on a straight road.

First be sure that you know exactly what you want to say. Then be sure you have said exactly that.

Ministers should be stars to give light, not clouds to obscure.

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

Those who write clearly have readers.

If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.

The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.