Quotes About Clarity

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero who must defend his actions with arguments and counterarguments and in the process often risks the loss of our tragic pity; for who could mistake the optimistic element in the nature of the dialectic, which celebrates a triumph with every conclusion and can breathe only in cool clarity and consciousness.

The most basic form of human stupidity is forgetting what we are trying to accomplish.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

I don't want to be mistaken for anyone?so I mustn't mistake myself.

It is good to express a matter in two ways simultaneously so as to give it both a right foot and a left. Truth can stand on one leg, to be sure; but with two it can walk and get about.

Not doubt, CERTAINTY is what drives one insane

I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.

Sometimes just a stronger pair of glasses will cure an amorous man.

There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.

who knows that he is profound strives for clearness; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity.

Stay not where the lowlands are! Climb not into the sky! The world looks best by far when viewed from halfway high.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.

Ésta es la fórmula de nuestra felicidad: un sí, un no, una línea recta, una meta...

Short-sighted people are amorous. Sometimes just a stronger pair of glasses will cure an amorous man; and if someone had the power to imagine a face or form twenty years older, he might go through life quite undisturbed.

It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter, is more good-natured, more straightforward, than silence.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.

My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things as they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going to shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted yourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live the intervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail.

There is always a simple way of saying things, said Fafhrd ominously. But there is where I differ with you, returned the adept, almost animatedly. There are no ways of saying certain things, and others are so difficult that a man pines and dies before the right words are found. One must borrow phrases from the sky, words from beyond the stars. Else were all an ignorant, imprisoning mockery.

One thing was clear: his attempt at sincerity and clarity had been a total failure. The world was accustomed to subterfuge and verbal pyrotechnics, and when it didn't get the expected commodity, it grew suspicious. Sincerity had no market value.