Pithy Prose: The Wit & Wisdom of People Named 'W'
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by Philip Yaffe
Part 3 of an occasional series
I am a collector of quotations. I have been ever since I learned how to
write, I mean professionally, not in primary school.
I am particularly fond of what I like to call "pithy prose".
These short quotations can cover an unlimited variety of subjects: love,
religion, politics, human nature, etc. What unites them is their ability to say
more in one or two sentences than could be expressed in a thousand-word
treatise. It's like being able to pour a liter of liquid into a half-liter
bottle.
They are superb examples of Mark Twain's famous dictum, "The
difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference
between lightning and a lightning bug."
In principle, all writers and public speakers are capable of producing
pithy prose, but clearly some are better at it than others.
Any collection of pithy prose must necessarily be biased in terms of
what it includes and excludes. I make no apologies for my selections, only for
the hundreds of other meritorious quotations I had to leave out.
No one will agree with all these quotations; this was not their
intention. You may even find some of them repugnant or outrageous. This was
their intention.
We seldom learn anything of value from what we already agree with. Only
those ideas that grate on our nerves can open our minds. As with oysters,
irritation can produce pearls. So if anything you are about to read annoys or
shocks you, try to think clearly and dispassionately about what it is saying.
You will either be confirmed in your current belief or shaken into re-examining
it.
Either way, you win!
This article is part of an occasional series. In each article, I will be
offering more amusing, educating, and exasperating quotations to your judgment.
But just to be certain that we agree on what we are talking about, here it is
in a nutshell.
Pithy Prose: A quotation where at first you may not be quite certain
what it means. But when you become certain, you become equally certain that it
couldn't have been said better any other way. In short, big ideas in small
packages.
If you have a better definition of pithy prose, please contact me. I
would love to hear it.
Who Are These
People Named "W"?
Some people, such
as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, are pithy prose factories. During their careers
they produced hundreds of quotations well worth remembering. Others produced
only a handful, but these too are well worth preserving.
This article is
dedicated to the wit & wisdom of people with surnames beginning with the
letter "w". If you don't recognize some of these people, it doesn't
matter. The source of timeless wit and wisdom is not important, only what it
said.
If you really
want to know who some of these people are, look it up on the Web. That's why it
was invented.
Horace Walpole
Imagination was given to man to compensate
him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he
is.
Life is a comedy for those who
think... and a tragedy for those who feel.
Nine-tenths of the people were created so
you would want to be with the other tenth.
The whole secret of life is to be interested
in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.
I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who
invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying
things.
Andy
Warhol
In the future everyone will be famous for 15
minutes.
Isn't life a series of images that change as
they repeat themselves?
Since people are going to be living longer
and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.
Being born is like being kidnapped. And then
sold into slavery.
Booker T. Washington
Excellence is to do a common thing in an
uncommon way.
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up
someone else.
Thomas J. Watson
The way to succeed is to double your error
rate.
Whenever an individual or a business decides
that success has been attained, progress stops.
Nothing so conclusively proves a man's
ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.
Evelyn
Waugh
It is a curious thing... that every creed
promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of
civilized taste.
The human mind is inspired enough when it
comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it
shows itself cloddish.
We cherish our friends not for their ability
to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
Daniel Webster
A strong conviction that something must be
done is the parent of many bad measures.
Falsehoods not only disagree with truths,
but usually quarrel among themselves.
Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
wholesome restraint.
There is nothing so powerful as truth, and
often nothing so strange.
H.G.
Wells
After people have repeated a phrase a great
number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
Beauty is in the heart of
the beholder.
History is a race between education and
catastrophe.
Our true nationality is mankind.
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
You have learned something. That always
feels at first as if you had lost something.
Edith Wharton
Silence may be as variously shaded as
speech.
The air of ideas is
the only air worth breathing.
Alfred North
Whitehead
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect
of foolishness when they are first produced.
An enormous part of our
mature experience cannot be expressed in words.
Civilization advances by extending the
number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Fundamental progress has to do with the
reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Human life is driven forward by its dim
apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
In formal logic, a contradiction is the
signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first
step in progress toward a victory.
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance,
is the death of knowledge.
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very
unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.
The silly question is the first intimation
of some totally new development.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths.
It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
We think in generalities, but we live in
detail.
Simon Wiesenthal
For evil to flourish, it only requires good
men to do nothing.
Violence is like a weed - it does not die
even in the greatest drought.
Elie
Wiesel
No human race is superior; no religious
faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
Not to transmit an experience is to betray
it.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's
indifference.
Harold Wilson
A week is a long time in politics.
He who rejects change is the architect of
decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
Woodrow Wilson
If you want to make enemies, try to change
something.
In the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is
for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty
stomach.
Never attempt to murder a man who is
committing suicide.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein
If people never did silly things nothing
intelligent would ever get done.
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not
to lie.
What can be shown cannot be said.
Thomas Wolfe
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of
beliefs.
John Wooden
It's what you learn after you know it all
that counts.
Never mistake activity for achievement.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the
well-fed.
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning
mind.
Previously in this Series
Part 1: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Wisdom of Mark
Twain
Part 2: Pithy Prose: The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar
Wilde
Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street
Journal and a marketing communication consultant. He currently teaches a course
in good writing and good speaking in
published book In the “I” of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing &
Speaking (Almost) like a Professional is available from Story Publishers in
(storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).
For further information, contact:
Philip
Brussels
Tel: +32 (0)2 660 0405
phil.yaffe@yahoo.com, phil.yaffe@gmail.com
About the Author
Philip Yaffe is a
former writer with The Wall Street Journal and international marketing
communication consultant. He now teaches courses in persuasive communication in
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