Brief Quotes

• Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Choose
  • Brief

• Life is so brief and time is a thief when you're undecided.

  

  Rod Stewart
  • Life
  • Time
  • Undecided

• Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.

  

  John Stuart Mill
  • Photography
  • Luck
  • Brief

• Be brief, be buoyant, and be brilliant.

  

  Brander Matthews
  • Brilliant
  • Brief
  • Buoyant

• Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.

  

  Floyd Skloot
  • Life
  • Observation
  • Brief

• Many brief follies--that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Love
  • Marriage
  • Stupidity

• Brief is this existence, as a visit in a strange house. The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.

  

  Albert Einstein
  • Path
  • Existence
  • Consciousness

• Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

  

  Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  • Life
  • Long
  • Live

• A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

  

  Franz Kafka
  • Lawyer
  • Writes
  • Brief

• The most 'popular,' the most 'successful' writers among us (for a brief period, at least) are, 99 times out of a hundred, persons of mere effrontery-in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.

  

  Edgar Allan Poe
  • Period
  • Successful
  • Writers

• It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

  

  Edgar Allan Poe
  • Poem
  • Degenerates
  • Epigrammatism

• Often have brief words laid men low and then raise them up.

  

  Sophocles
  • Raise
  • Brief
  • Laid

• What's a man's first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.

  

  Henrik Ibsen
  • Answer
  • Brief
  • First Duty

• I shall be so brief that I have already finished.

  

  Salvador Dali
  • Finished
  • Brief

• Briefs are like, when you wear briefs it's like someone's got a hold of you 24 hours a day.

  

  Ben Gillies Silverchair
  • Hold
  • Wear
  • Brief

• I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

  

  Salvador Dali
  • Finished
  • Brief

• The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.

  

  Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Honest
  • Stupidity
  • Brief

• Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinúviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that Lúthien Tinúviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved.

  

  J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Together
  • Sea
  • Long Ago

• Candlesticks and incense not being portable into the maintop, the sailor perceives these decorations to be, on the whole, inessential to a maintop mass. Sails must be set and cables bent, be it never so strict a saint's day; and it is found that no harm comes of it. Absolution on a lee-shore must be had of the breakers, it appears, if at all; and they give plenary and brief without listening to confession.

  

  John Ruskin
  • Confession
  • Sailor
  • Decorations

• Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

  

  Euripides
  • God
  • Happiness
  • Brief

• Be clear, be brief, be human.

  

  Ernest Gowers
  • Human
  • Clear
  • Brief

• Words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it’s only for a very brief time.

  

  Elena Ferrante
  • Words
  • Brief
  • Right Place

• Be brief, for no talk can please when too long.

  

  Miguel de Cervantes
  • Brief
  • Too Long

• It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

  

  William Faulkner
  • Death
  • Child
  • Intelligence

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