Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

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The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

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John Ruskin

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

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Sophocles

Much wisdom often goes with fewest words.

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Socrates

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

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He is nearest to God who has the fewest wants.

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Socrates

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

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He who asks the fewest favours is the best received.

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He who asks the fewest favors is the best received.

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He is the best general who makes the fewest mistakes.

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Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

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I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts.

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Public action should seek to expand the set of opportunities of those who have the least voice and fewest resources and capabilities.

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Walter Scott

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

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The Apple has the fewest bells and whistles. It has simple sound and few graphics special effects. In a way, that is a weakness because markets for the other machines are getting bigger.

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Love

For only in silence
Can one come to understanding
For in the fewest words
Comes forth the
Greater voice

And Wisdom is everywhere
Just breath it in
Let it penetrate every
Cell of your body

Love is elusive
Fleeting, seldom enduring;
Buttercup butterflies
Bouncing in an autumn wind,
Here, then gone again

Combine wisdom with understanding
And love, and you
Will come to a crossroad,
A passing of a point

Then you leave
You pass that point;
And what was a brilliance of light
For a moment, flashes and
Disappears into eternity

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The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account.

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Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.

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Jonathan Swift

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

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The lowest trees have tops

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat,
And slender hairs cast shadows though but small,
And bees have stings although they be not great.
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs,
And love is love in beggars and in kings.

Where waters smoothest run, deep are the fords,
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move:
The firmest faith is in the fewest words,
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love,
True hearts have eyes and ears no tongues to speak:
They hear, and see, and sigh, and then they break.

poem by Sir Edward DyerReport problemRelated quotes
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Unmethodical discourse at a café table

By the flickering candlelight
of the long evenings,
inimical to study so they said

they played this game
to while away the time
between learning and authority

in that Jesuit college
in the early 1600s:

blindfolded or simply shut-eye and don’t cheat
you turn the pages of the Latin dictionary at random
and stick a pin, in turn, upon a random word;

the first to make a sentence
in the fewest rounds, the fewest words, wins
a prize of choice..

we do not know the prize
(among those severe, repressed, ambitious
boys, perhaps it’s just as well…)
or what the others drew;

but this we know: that night
René pricked a first word – ‘sum’ – ah! -
promising! a verb was useful, in this game—

the second round… he pricked on ‘ergo’…
that swift mind already playing the tables
of his agile mind…

the air was tense; they’d remember
this night, this flickering light,
forever in their future lives…

a hush (how boys fight to win
more fiercely than Christ’s soldiers,
whom they would become…)

‘Cogito’! A shout of triumph
from our René – and the rest
is history – alas..

It’s said the Devil enters in
at the third stroke; and so it was:

in three words, a lifetime’s career
as the greatest of divines
in an age of awe for the divine

were lost to mere – philosophy…
the age of Clairvaux, Cluny, Chartres
for all too brief a moment,
saw the vision of a glorious revival; but...

triumphantly, our René shouts
‘Á moi, c’est la conquéte! Le jeu d’esprit á moi! ’
(impeccable Racinian hexameter, naturellement..) –

alas for human vanity! The gods were whispering
‘Sum, ergo cogito! ’ in his spiritual ear – but no –
his chose mankind’s so vain conceit

and launched a thousand thousand
café tables on the pavement; seated there
in black, with scarf and beret, sunglasses,

in a cloud of choking gitane and gauloise smoke,
centuries of self-satisfied philosophes,
believing 'cogito, ergo sum': that they are their thought; born
as true Frenchmen, to be world thinkers, Rodin-like; and
that because they think, they are… somebody…

oh René, what a fall was there...

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