by Philip Yaffe


Detail 3 of an rare series


I am a collector of quotations. I keep been ever because I learned how to write, I selfish professionally, not in substantial school.


I am largely fond of what I allied to bell "pithy prose". These short quotations can comprehend an unlimited conglomeration of subjects: love, religion, politics, human nature, etc. What unites them is their competence to state aggrandized in one or two sentences than could be expressed in a thousand-word treatise. It's allying life able to pour a litre of liquid into a half-liter bottle.


They are superb examples of Location Twain's noted dictum, "The contrariety between the equitable locution and the nearly correct confab is the contrariness between lightning and a lightning bug."


In principle, all writers and universal speakers are capable of producing summary prose, however clearly some are more desirable at it than others.


Any crowd of compact prose must necessarily be biassed in terms of what it includes and excludes. I cause no apologies for my selections, apart for the hundreds of other meritorious quotations I had to dispensation out.


No one testament check with all these quotations; this was not their intention. You may still jewel some of them repugnant or outrageous. This was their intention.


We seldom determine anything of price from what we already comply with. Onliest those ideas that grate on our nerves can plain our minds. As with oysters, irritation can cause pearls. So whether anything you are approximately to scan annoys or shocks you, jab to estimate clearly and dispassionately about what it is saying. You will either be confirmed in your contemporary doctrine or shaken into re-examining it.


Either way, you win!


This article is cut of an irregular series. In everyone article, I will be offering another amusing, educating, and exasperating quotations to your judgment. On the other hand equitable to be decided that we concur on what we are talking about, here it is in a nutshell.


Concise Prose: A citation where at beginning you may not be fully trustworthy what it means. Nevertheless when you ripen into certain, you pass into equally undeniable that it couldn't keep been said exceptional any other way. In short, bulky ideas in miniature packages.


Provided you corner a improved definition of succinct prose, please contact me. I would amity to hear it.


Who Are These Tribe Named "W"?


Some people, such as Oscar Wilde and Speck Twain, are condensed prose factories. During their careers they produced hundreds of quotations hardy payment remembering. Others produced matchless a handful, on the contrary these as well are fine bill preserving.


This article is committed to the wit & sageness of folk with surnames inception with the dispatch "w". If you don't recall some of these people, it doesn't matter. The source of timeless wit and sagacity is not important, one what it said.


If you de facto wish to appreciate who some of these persons are, cast it up on the Web. That's why it was invented.


Horace Walpole


Intellect was addicted to subject to compensate him for what he isn't. A thought of humour was if to console him for what he is.


Get-up-and-go is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.


Nine-tenths of the nation were created so you would thirst for to be with the other tenth.


The complete secret of continuance is to be affected in one effects profoundly and in a thousand matters well.


Lech Walesa


I'm lazy. But it's the dull community who invented the revolve and the bicycle since they didn't love walking or carrying things.


Andrew Warhol


In the coming each will be famous for 15 minutes.


Isn't excitement a series of images that convert as they repeat themselves?


By reason of mortals are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll condign hold to grind how to be babies longer.


Vitality born is conforming lifetime kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.


Booker T. Washington


Excellence is to conclude a frequent tool in an infrequent way.


If you hunger to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.


Thomas J. Watson


The course to succeed is to banal your fault rate.


Whenever an odd or a metier decides that eminence has been attained, success stops.


Insignificancy so conclusively proves a man's faculty to bob others as what he does from generation to hour to front rank himself.


Evelyn Waugh


It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be certainly uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.


The human gray matter is inspired sufficiently when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.


We liking our friends not for their knack to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.


Daniel Webster


A active conviction that something must be done is the fountain of crowded pathetic measures.


Falsehoods not by oneself disagree with truths, but normally affray among themselves.


Grip cool; annoyance is not an argument.


Freedom exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.


There is nihility so authoritarian as truth, and ofttimes bagatelle so strange.


H.G. Wells


After bourgeois accept repeated a phrase a bull symbol of times, they found to conceive it has acceptation and may yet be true.


Fairness is in the emotions of the beholder.


Story is a competition between education and catastrophe.


Our authentic nationality is mankind.


The crisis of nowadays is the bon mot of tomorrow.


You retain learned something. That always feels at head as if you had astray something.


Edith Wharton


Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.


The air of ideas is the single air valuation breathing.


Alfred North Whitehead


Almost all au courant ideas gain a definite attribute of foolishness when they are first off produced.


An huge apportionment of our mature knowledge cannot be expressed in words.


Civilization advances by extending the figure of valuable operations which we can perform without thinking of them.


Essential progress has to engage in with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.


Human duration is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions extremely public for its existing language.


In formal logic, a contradiction is the vocable of defeat, but in the evolution of genuine scholarship it marks the inceptive operation in progress toward a victory.


Practice shrinks as cleverness grows.


Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the departure of knowledge.


Seek simplicity but mistrust it.


Effortless solutions seldom are. It takes a express abnormal function to undertake dialogue of the obvious.


The foolish debate is the headmost intimation of some completetly cutting edge development.


There are no integral truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as entire truths that plays to the devil.


We envision in generalities, but we vital in detail.


Simon Wiesenthal


For damaging to flourish, it particular requires worthy men to cook nothing.


Acuteness is affection a weed - it does not die all the more in the greatest drought.


Elie Wiesel


No human pursuit is superior; no devout faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Sole racists fabricate them.


Not to send an contact is to betray it.


The contrary of devotedness is not hate, it's indifference.


Harold Wilson


A week is a extended date in politics.


He who rejects interchange is the architect of decay. The lone human school which rejects progress is the cemetery.


Woodrow Wilson


If you hankering to assemble enemies, fling to pin money something.


In the Lord's Prayer, the inaugural beseech is for diurnal bread. No one can worship Absolute being or ardor his neighbour on an empty stomach.


Never attack to homicide a workman who is committing suicide.


Ludwig Wittgenstein


If bodies never did foolish things no thing comprehending would ever amuse done.


Someone who knows also yet finds it compact not to lie.


What can be shown cannot be said.


Thomas Wolfe


Culture is the arts elevated to a locate of beliefs.


John Wooden


It's what you gain after you be read it all that counts.


Never error action for achievement.


Regulate Lloyd Wright


Craft for art's wellbeing is a philosophy of the well-fed.


The feelings is the manager side of a functioning mind.


Formerly in this Series


Belongings 1: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Erudition of Objective Twain
Effects 2: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde


Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Annals and a marketing notice consultant. He currently teaches a succession in great writing and excellent speaking in Brussels, Belgium. His recently published volume In the "I" of the Storm: the Incomplex Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) commensurate a Finished is available from Novel Publishers in Ghent, Belgium (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).

For very information, contact:

Philip Yaffe
Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)2 660 0405
phil.yaffe@yahoo.com, phil.yaffe@gmail.com