A Quote by William Zinsser

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

William Zinsser

Quote Topics

Basic Brevity Clarity Four Humanity Premises Simplicity Writing

Quote Author

William Zinsser
American - Writer
October 7, 1922 - May 12, 2015

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

William Zinsser

There are three basic principles behind any well-designed product: truth, humanity, and simplicity.

Sohrab Vossoughi

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

Malcolm Gladwell

No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity.

Katherine Cecil Thurston

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

Jonathan Ive

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Alfred North Whitehead

At any moment, we are either giving humanity the gift of our clarity or our confusion. And that clarity or confusion is affecting the humanity around us, the world around us. It is manifesting. It is taking form.

Adyashanti

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

George Oppen

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression which classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown.

Albert Einstein

Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest.

Theophile Gautier

If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.

Michael R. Burch

He who writes distichs, wishes, I suppose, to please by brevity. But, tell me, of what avail is their brevity, when there is a whose book full of them?