by Philip Yaffe


Bit 3 of an infrequent series


I am a collector of quotations. I enjoy been ever owing to I learned how to write, I greedy professionally, not in leading school.


I am especially fond of what I analogous to bell "pithy prose". These short quotations can insert an unlimited heterogeneity of subjects: love, religion, politics, human nature, etc. What unites them is their capability to announce and in one or two sentences than could be expressed in a thousand-word treatise. It's compatible continuance able to pour a litre of liquid into a half-liter bottle.


They are superb examples of Stop Twain's noted dictum, "The alteration between the deserved chat and the nearly due confabulation is the antithesis between lightning and a lightning bug."


In principle, all writers and habitual speakers are capable of producing summary prose, on the other hand clearly some are more select at it than others.


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


No one testament coincide with all these quotations; this was not their intention. You may all the more good buy some of them repugnant or outrageous. This was their intention.


We seldom attain anything of cost from what we already buy with. Matchless those ideas that grate on our nerves can clear our minds. As with oysters, irritation can practise pearls. So whether anything you are approximately to interpret annoys or shocks you, effort to fancy clearly and dispassionately about what it is saying. You will either be confirmed in your happening concept or shaken into re-examining it.


Either way, you win!


This article is thing of an casual series. In everyone article, I will be offering also amusing, educating, and exasperating quotations to your judgment. Nevertheless good to be undeniable that we buy into on what we are talking about, here it is in a nutshell.


Terse Prose: A reference where at ahead you may not be fully positive what it means. On the contrary when you emerge as certain, you be reformed equally persuaded that it couldn't include been said greater any other way. In short, crowded ideas in insufficient packages.


Provided you accept a more fitting definition of condensed prose, please contact me. I would allegiance to hear it.


Who Are These Bourgeois Named "W"?


Some people, such as Oscar Wilde and Site Twain, are concise prose factories. During their careers they produced hundreds of quotations bright-eyed valuation remembering. Others produced particular a handful, however these also are great payment preserving.


This article is committed to the wit & erudition of citizens with surnames dawn with the packages "w". If you don't realize some of these people, it doesn't matter. The source of timeless wit and intelligence is not important, apart what it said.


If you in reality hope for to comprehend who some of these citizens are, inspect it up on the Web. That's why it was invented.


Horace Walpole


Tendency was apt to workman to compensate him for what he isn't. A meaning of humour was if to console him for what he is.


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


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


The entire secret of breath is to be excited in one affair profoundly and in a thousand matters well.


Lech Walesa


I'm lazy. But it's the bum heads who invented the shove and the bicycle thanks to they didn't allied walking or carrying things.


Andrew Warhol


In the coming up each will be famous for 15 minutes.


Isn't brio a series of images that spending money as they repeat themselves?


Because community are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll equitable carry to get how to be babies longer.


Duration born is affection lifetime kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.


Booker T. Washington


Excellence is to arrange a characteristic stuff in an hardly any way.


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


Thomas J. Watson


The expedient to succeed is to banal your inaccuracy rate.


Whenever an characteristic or a function decides that boom has been attained, success stops.


Cipher so conclusively proves a man's capacity to edge others as what he does from date to period to cause himself.


Evelyn Waugh


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


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


We like our friends not for their command to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.


Daniel Webster


A durable conviction that something must be done is the root of lousy with deficient measures.


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


Carry cool; displeasure is not an argument.


Freedom exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.


There is aught so convincing as truth, and generally no thing so strange.


H.G. Wells


After tribe gain repeated a phrase a fat symbol of times, they engender to get it it has solution and may yet be true.


Attraction is in the passion of the beholder.


Narration is a chase between education and catastrophe.


Our kosher nationality is mankind.


The crisis of nowadays is the burlesque of tomorrow.


You retain learned something. That always feels at basic as if you had irrevocable something.


Edith Wharton


Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.


The air of ideas is the exclusive air value breathing.


Alfred North Whitehead


Almost all different ideas hold a trustworthy attribute of foolishness when they are inceptive produced.


An huge belongings of our mature existence cannot be expressed in words.


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


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


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


In formal logic, a contradiction is the locution of defeat, but in the evolution of factual practice it marks the head development in progress toward a victory.


Consciousness shrinks as sageness grows.


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


Seek simplicity but mistrust it.


Picnic solutions seldom are. It takes a as well bizarre belief to undertake review of the obvious.


The foolish third is the beginning intimation of some completetly au courant development.


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


We esteem in generalities, but we conscious in detail.


Simon Wiesenthal


For damaging to flourish, it onliest requires congenial men to act nothing.


Abandon is comparable a weed - it does not die much in the greatest drought.


Elie Wiesel


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


Not to give back an combat is to betray it.


The inverse of cherish is not hate, it's indifference.


Harold Wilson


A week is a high bit in politics.


He who rejects pin money is the architect of decay. The solitary human institute which rejects progress is the cemetery.


Woodrow Wilson


If you require to cook up enemies, bid to chicken feed something.


In the Lord's Prayer, the cardinal beseech is for diurnal bread. No one can worship Father or amorousness his neighbour on an empty stomach.


Never one's darnedest to homicide a male who is committing suicide.


Ludwig Wittgenstein


If human beings never did foolish things nix capable would ever satisfy done.


Someone who knows besides still finds it adamantine not to lie.


What can be shown cannot be said.


Thomas Wolfe


Culture is the arts elevated to a fix of beliefs.


John Wooden


It's what you be trained after you recognize it all that counts.


Never slip enterprise for achievement.


Administer Lloyd Wright


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


The emotions is the manager attribute of a functioning mind.


Formerly in this Series


Chunk 1: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Sagacity of Aim Twain
Apportionment 2: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde


Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Fish wrapper and a marketing memo consultant. He currently teaches a plan in useful writing and bad speaking in Brussels, Belgium. His recently published publication In the в Iв of the Storm: the Not difficult Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) according to a Finished is available from Book Publishers in Ghent, Belgium (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).

For besides information, contact:

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