Quotes About Clarity

I felt like I was seeing Shannon through a new lens, undistracted by Jennifer's nuclear glow. I could see how pretty she really was, how kind her eyes were.

Art is not to throw light but to be light...

Someone asked Rodin how he could sculpt an elephant out of marble. It's easy, he responded, "You just chip away everything that isn't an elephant." Chip away everything that isn't your point.

One executive suggests a discipline — putting down first what you want the reader to do, next the three most important things the reader needs to understand to take that action, then starting to write. When you're done, he suggests asking yourself whether if you were the reader, would you take action on the basis of what is written.

Bad writing slows things down; good writing speeds them up.

Take the time to boil down what you want to say, and express it confidently in simple, declarative sentences. Remember the man who apologized for writing such a long letter, explaining that he didn't have time to write a short one.

Most murky writing is inadvertent, a sincere if doomed effort to communicate. Far worse is the deliberate attempt to say something that you know readers won't like in a way that you hope they won't understand.

This style of talk is generally heard among middle managers. It seldom comes from the CEO, who, having risen to the top, is less interested in impressing people than in clear communications — and getting things done.

A common mistake in business writing is to use quotation marks for emphasis: This bolt provides "superior" tensile strength. When the head of a large company put quotation marks around a word in an important paper, his administrative assistant asked him why he did that. He replied that it was to stress the truth of the point. The assistant asked whether it would stress the truth if he were to register at a hotel as John Durgin and "wife.

The fact of life is that the appreciation of true beauty cannot start without total renunciation. [...] But to live beautifully, one needs an unfettered mind, a mind that is not clogged up with all kinds of attachments, opinions, or fossilized ways of looking at things. There is no need to get rid of anything as long as we can sever our attachments to it.

It's not my job to "manage" someone else's expectations. It's their job to manage their own expectations. It's my job to do my best and to communicate clearly.

I just want to live simply and pay attention to what's happening each day.

But facts are chiels that winna ding, and downa be disputed.

You have no idea how long a year is until you're stone sober.

Stupid people can learn a language quiet and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.

A firm's income statement may be, likened to a bikini-what it reveals is interesting but what it conceals is vital.

So time flows slow and worthless If it keeps me from understanding What I need, what I want

If you open a book and find that the writer is trying to impress you with his knowledge of long, unusual words or by his use of foreign phrases, close the book quickly with no sense of loss or of deficiency or of having missed anything; for the author has not learned how to write and perhaps never will, and there is no need for you to offer yourself as a sounding board for his incompetence.

Always look like you know where you're going, even when you don't.

We were probably not as lighthearted as Clooney and Sandra Bullock. We didn't tell too many jokes when people were in some position of jeopardy outside the spacecraft, but I think that's the humanity coming through in the characters. This movie gave great clarity to looking down and seeing the features of Earth ... but there weren't enough clouds, and maybe there was too precise a delineation from space.

Words are hoops Through which to leap upon meanings, Which are horses' backs, Bare, moving.

Solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. I am better able to tell what in the world is wheat for me and what is chaff. In fact, my definition of success itself is changing.

An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.

In my experience, we don't make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn't personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.