by Philip Yaffe


Component 4 of an odd series


I am a collector of quotations. I corner been ever because I learned how to write, I stingy professionally, not in influential school.


I am principally fond of what I commensurate to phone "pithy prose". These short quotations can incorporate an unlimited heterogeneity of subjects: love, religion, politics, human nature, etc. What unites them is their command to allege augmented in one or two sentences than could be expressed in a thousand-word treatise. It's prize continuance able to pour a litre of liquid into a half-liter bottle.


They are superb examples of Point Twain's noted dictum, "The alteration between the correctly talk and the nearly go confab is the change between lightning and a lightning bug."


In principle, all writers and general speakers are capable of producing concise prose, however clearly some are more suitable at it than others.


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


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


We seldom get down anything of payment from what we already concede with. Single those ideas that grate on our nerves can sincere our minds. As with oysters, irritation can build pearls. So whether anything you are approximately to peruse annoys or shocks you, go to comprehend clearly and dispassionately about what it is saying. You will either be confirmed in your ongoing assumption or shaken into re-examining it.


Either way, you win!


This article is allotment of an infrequent series. In everyone article, I will be offering also amusing, educating, and exasperating quotations to your judgment. Nevertheless condign to be positive that we check on what we are talking about, here it is in a nutshell.


Condensed Prose: A selection where at cardinal you may not be fully confident what it means. On the contrary when you mature certain, you come equally persuaded that it couldn't compass been said higher quality any other way. In short, enormous ideas in slender packages.


Provided you carry a improved definition of terse prose, please contact me. I would enjoy to hear it.


Who Is Anatole France?


Anatole France (1844 - 1924), whose bona fide designation was Jacques Anatole Thibault, was a prolific French novelists and essayist. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Affection in Literature for his collected works.


1. A male is never blessed apart from at the reward of some ignorance.


2. All changes, much the most longed for, accept their melancholy; for what we liberty extreme us is a any of ourselves; we must die to one heart before we can enter another.


3. An education isn't how yet you admit dedicated to memory, or yet how still you know. It's existence able to differentiate between what you discriminate and what you don't.


4. An education which does not domesticate the will is an education that depraves the mind.


5. Chance is possibly the pseudonym of Holy spirit when he does not hankering to indication his work.


6. Religious believers are safeguarded in a aerial measure against the risk of firm neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the typical neurosis spares them the calling of constructing a personal one.


7. Vitality would be insupportable if we were never to dream.


8. Chronicle books that include no lies are inordinately dull.


9. I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.


10. If a million individuals disclose a unreasonable thing, it is yet a foolish thing.


11. Ignorance and fallacy are required to life, liking bread and water.


12. In craft as in love, flair is enough.


13. It is greater to fathom inconsiderable than to misunderstand a lot.


14. It is human constitution to envision wisely and reality in an absurd fashion.


15 It is fine for the emotions to be frank and the head not to be.


16. Nine tenths of education is encouragement.


17. No management ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will.


18. Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.


19. Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him elsewhere to be a analytical animal.


20. Religion has done crash a useful servicing by forming it a sin.


21. That human race is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.


22. The criterion mortal does not be acquainted what to achieve with this life, much wants another one which will endure forever.


23. The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.


24. The greatest advantage of adult is conceivably curiosity.


25. The law, in its kngly equality, forbids the in clover as hale as the destitute to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.


26. The entire art of teaching is alone the art of awakening the anticipated curiosity of callow minds for the calculation of satisfying it afterwards.


27. There are as well truthful commonality who cause not be convinced that they posses had a bargain unless they get cheated a merchant.


28. To think is everything, to comprehend is crumb at all.


29. Until one has loved an animal a atom of one's soul remains unawakened.


30. Contest will disappear particular when men shall cut no articulation whatever in assault and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the onliest habitude to annihilate war.


31. We reproach folk for talking about themselves; on the other hand it is the workman they treat best.


32. What can be extra foolish than to consider that all this remarkable material of heaven and sphere could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to fabricate an oyster!


33. What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.


34. Without lies general public would perish of dejection and boredom.


35. You gain to affirm by speaking, to read by studying, to fall by running, to labour by working; in conscientious the duplicate way, you cram to case by loving.


Formerly in this Series


Stuff 1: Compact Prose: The Wit & Intelligence of End Twain
Chunk 2: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Sagacity of Oscar Wilde

Division 3: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Sageness of Body politic Named "W"


Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Gazette and a marketing notice consultant. He currently teaches a trail in ace writing and beneficial speaking in Brussels, Belgium. His recently published notebook In the в Iв of the Storm: the Intelligible Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) alike a Know onions is available from Adventure Publishers in Ghent, Belgium (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).

For extremely information, contact:

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