If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter

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“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal, mathematician and physicist.

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”
Henry David Thoreau, writer and philosopher.

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero, philosopher and statesman.

“You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician and scientist.

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher.

“The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.”
François Fénelon, writer e theologian.

“No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all-disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report…”
Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States.

“If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today.  If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.”
Mark Twain, writer.

All those aphorisms are very aligned with the mood of this blog, I had to rewrite those here. I’ll probably use them sooner or later.
(via Dangerous Intersections)