Brevity: Quotes & Notes
2025-07-12
Leisure Time
Brevity takes work.
Many quote Mark Twain with “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Delightful! But was he first to write this?
In 1656, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote:
“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”
Google Translate converts this to “I only made this one longer because I didn’t have the leisure to make it shorter.” Almost, but not exactly the same.
Great humor can be achieved with plain words. The word “loisir” (leisure) isn’t particularly fancy, but Twain’s version is simpler.
Just one problem: those weren’t his actual words. The honest original wording from Twain, though arguably more concise, was not as brief as the popular quote. The subtle balance between these is almost impossible to strike perfectly. 1
I ought to leave it here for brevity, but I have to show my work for completeness.
Extra Credit: Nuance
I only found the above thanks to Tania Lombrozo in an NPR article on brevity where she writes:
“Recognizing and negotiating the tradeoff between brevity and nuance, between punch line and qualification, is itself half the value.”
Excellent point with many potential threads. Today, I’ll focus on “nuance” because of its French origin.
Messages already reduce complex thoughts and emotions into a proxy of words, so special care must be taken to provide just enough detail to at least acknowledge the related nuance.
Albert Maysles said, “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance” and I think this pairs nicely with “Tyranny of choice” by Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004). Technically the latter is on too many decisions, so “Tyranny of verbosity” might be more appropriate.
Resist Tyranny and Choose Simplicity
I searched “Tyranny of verbosity” to look for existing work and was surprised to find no good results. Gemini tried and got the general idea. Unsatisfied, I tried to find quotes to at least describe the concept.
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.”
– Mark Twain
Twain strikes again. However, these are more words than I’d expect from him. Perhaps he was playing at nuance, or simply short on time.
For brevity, Mokokoma Mokhonoana does well:
“Verbosity wastes a portion of the reader’s or listener’s life.”
Less dramatic than “Tyranny of verbosity” but this was stated before LLMs got so big. We need better words against these oppressors of robotic language.
Why Say Anything at All?
There’s a scene from The Old Man where Dan Chase (played by Jeff Bridges) shares a story about a wise man who refused to speak.
“…because he believed that language deceived. That by its very nature, it clouded the truth, so it made the world harder to know. And, uh, this… this wise old man, he believed that the truth… the truth lived only in silence.”
I love Bridges’s poignant (and ironically verbose) portrayal of the speech is silver, silence is golden proverb.
There is certainly wisdom here, but most of us cannot live that way. We don’t all have the luxury to always remain silent. Doing so can sometimes allow unfortunate events to occur. Of course, actions speak louder than words, and yet we still must express ourselves, share our ideas, and communicate through other means when action alone is insufficient.
Einstein is credited with saying, “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.” 2
That seems like a good target. I’m no Einstein, so I’m sure there’s a simpler way to put this. Since a haiku would be too reductive, I’ll just leave this here:
Aim to be brief
Grant readers relief
Resist tyranny of extremes
Choose liberty in between
Say what you must
Protect the trust
Be kind and true
Let you do you
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Twain’s actual letter wrote: “You’ll have to excuse my lengthiness—the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost.” - Relatable. ↩
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In fairness, Quote Investigator quibbles about the precise origins of this Einstein quote, but time is both limited and relative. Do as you must. ↩