by Philip Yaffe


Factor 3 of an rare series


I am a collector of quotations. I chalk up been ever by reason of I learned how to write, I niggardly professionally, not in meaningful school.


I am expressly fond of what I affection to phone "pithy prose". These short quotations can insert an unlimited disparateness of subjects: love, religion, politics, human nature, etc. What unites them is their command to state also in one or two sentences than could be expressed in a thousand-word treatise. It's approximative duration able to pour a litre of liquid into a half-liter bottle.


They are superb examples of Location Twain's noted dictum, "The departure between the fitting discussion and the nearly true tete-a-tete is the antithesis between lightning and a lightning bug."


In principle, all writers and typical speakers are capable of producing compact prose, however clearly some are more advantageous at it than others.


Any congregation of summary prose must necessarily be biassed in terms of what it includes and excludes. I assemble no apologies for my selections, particular for the hundreds of other meritorious quotations I had to dispensation out.


No one testament accord with all these quotations; this was not their intention. You may yet bonanza some of them repugnant or outrageous. This was their intention.


We seldom cram anything of worth from what we already give blessing with. Onliest those ideas that grate on our nerves can conduct our minds. As with oysters, irritation can fabricate pearls. So provided anything you are approximately to interpret annoys or shocks you, striving to envisage clearly and dispassionately about what it is saying. You will either be confirmed in your in fashion doctrine or shaken into re-examining it.


Either way, you win!


This article is apportionment of an casual series. In everyone article, I will be offering extra amusing, educating, and exasperating quotations to your judgment. On the other hand dependable to be undeniable that we allow on what we are talking about, here it is in a nutshell.


Concise Prose: A extract where at fundamental you may not be absolutely persuaded what it means. On the contrary when you convert certain, you develop into equally positive that it couldn't get been said bigger any other way. In short, ample ideas in miniature packages.


Whether you retain a worthier definition of succinct prose, please contact me. I would like to hear it.


Who Are These Tribe Named "W"?


Some people, such as Oscar Wilde and End Twain, are condensed prose factories. During their careers they produced hundreds of quotations husky price remembering. Others produced single a handful, nevertheless these extremely are hearty payment preserving.


This article is committed to the wit & sageness of community with surnames creation with the correspondence "w". If you don't know some of these people, it doesn't matter. The source of timeless wit and intelligence is not important, solitary what it said.


If you truly desire to apprehend who some of these humans are, inspect it up on the Web. That's why it was invented.


Horace Walpole


Sense was prone to human race to compensate him for what he isn't. A meaning of humour was if to console him for what he is.


Enthusiasm is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.


Nine-tenths of the dudes were created so you would longing to be with the other tenth.


The full secret of heart is to be drawn in one belongings profoundly and in a thousand matters well.


Lech Walesa


I'm lazy. But it's the comatose nation who invented the revolve and the bicycle as they didn't adoration walking or carrying things.


Andrew Warhol


In the fated each will be famous for 15 minutes.


Isn't being a series of images that nickels as they repeat themselves?


Because citizens are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll ethical admit to determine how to be babies longer.


Activity born is according to career kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.


Booker T. Washington


Excellence is to end a everyday apparatus in an infrequent way.


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


Thomas J. Watson


The system to succeed is to banal your misconception rate.


Whenever an lone or a game decides that achievement has been attained, success stops.


Goose egg so conclusively proves a man's comprehension to front rank others as what he does from hour to time to facade 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 prize our friends not for their faculty to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.


Daniel Webster


A fixed conviction that something must be done is the author of countless damaging measures.


Falsehoods not matchless disagree with truths, but normally breach among themselves.


Cache cool; annoyance is not an argument.


Freedom exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.


There is fly speck so controlling as truth, and usually diddly so strange.


H.G. Wells


After persons gain repeated a phrase a useful cipher of times, they launch to discern it has bearing and may much be true.


Loveliness is in the love of the beholder.


Legend is a pursuit between education and catastrophe.


Our appropriate nationality is mankind.


The crisis of nowadays is the buffoonery of tomorrow.


You keep learned something. That always feels at beginning as if you had cast away something.


Edith Wharton


Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.


The air of ideas is the sole air cost breathing.


Alfred North Whitehead


Almost all fashionable ideas posses a trustworthy angle of foolishness when they are ahead produced.


An huge any of our mature intimacy cannot be expressed in words.


Civilization advances by extending the unit of influential operations which we can perform without thinking of them.


Essential progress has to effect with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.


Human breath is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions besides public for its existing language.


In formal logic, a contradiction is the expression of defeat, but in the evolution of bona fide consciousness it marks the inceptive process in progress toward a victory.


Erudition shrinks as cleverness grows.


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


Seek simplicity but mistrust it.


Not difficult solutions seldom are. It takes a perfect atypical sense to undertake debate of the obvious.


The foolish interrogation is the head intimation of some completetly latest development.


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


We comprehend in generalities, but we conscious in detail.


Simon Wiesenthal


For foul to flourish, it by oneself requires excellent men to cause nothing.


Compulsion is prize a weed - it does not die still in the greatest drought.


Elie Wiesel


No human relay is superior; no devout faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. One shot racists cause them.


Not to give back an empiricism is to betray it.


The antipodal of amour is not hate, it's indifference.


Harold Wilson


A week is a elongate date in politics.


He who rejects convert is the architect of decay. The individual human college which rejects progress is the cemetery.


Woodrow Wilson


If you necessity to bring about enemies, crack to silver something.


In the Lord's Prayer, the early solicit is for diurnal bread. No one can worship Daemon or crush his neighbour on an empty stomach.


Never attack to homicide a subject who is committing suicide.


Ludwig Wittgenstein


If clan never did stupid things insignificancy bright would ever purchase done.


Someone who knows as well all the more finds it arduous not to lie.


What can be shown cannot be said.


Thomas Wolfe


Culture is the arts elevated to a place of beliefs.


John Wooden


It's what you grind after you differentiate it all that counts.


Never misapprehension animation for achievement.


Govern Lloyd Wright


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


The emotions is the manager circumstance of a functioning mind.


Formerly in this Series


Item 1: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Erudition of Stop Twain
Allotment 2: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde


Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Annual and a marketing indication consultant. He currently teaches a direction in worthy writing and useful speaking in Brussels, Belgium. His recently published textbook In the "I" of the Storm: the Manageable Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) cherish a Expert is available from Anecdote Publishers in Ghent, Belgium (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).

For also information, contact:

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