Quotes About Clarity

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

I don't want any funny business, and above all I don't want to be dragged into other people's funny business. If it's to be my head on the block, I want to know that it's doing there, and not that it's some stupid things that other people have done.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.

Such a person can see without "pre-judice", that is, without judging in advance; he will judge only on the basis of what he has really seen for himself

Coffee black, water tap, whisky neat.

Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.

To say more is to say less.

Eyes blinded by the fog of things cannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of things cannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of things cannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of things cannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of things cannot speak truth.

Nothing is so tiring to the reader as excavating nuggets of meaning from mountains of words.

Speechwriter Barton Swaim cheerfully explains why the opaque may be a virtue. "Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language," he writes, "is not the same as lying: it's not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you're saying something instead of nothing.

The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.

Sir William Haley, one of my predecessors as editor of the Times, said, "There are things which are bad and false and ugly and no amount of specious casuistry will make them good or true or beautiful.

haiku were not written to be weighed down with commentary. (Buson, p. 103)

No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one's vitals.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense. Characters become more fully developed and the meaning of earlier incidents begins to become clear. And when we to the end, there is a satisfying sense of completeness to it.

Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this." He turns out the light. BLACKOUT

I referred to the innate human need for what psychologist Arie Kruglanski was the first to label "cognitive closure," which he defined as "the individual's need for a firm answer to a question and aversion to ambiguity."[ 3]

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

Delete the adjectives and [you'll] have the facts.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.