Echoes

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.

The surest way to arouse and hold the reader's attention is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.

Exactitude is not truth.

The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.

These circumstances, trivial as they may seem, have their importance; since without them we could never have come to any certainty.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.

I would prefer inarticulate wisdom to loquacious foolishness.

God is in the details.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

The adjective hasn't yet been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

The stomach is not to be loaded, for there is nothing so hostile to thought as a full belly.