50 Brevity Quotes and Sayings in Writing, of Life and Time

FTC disclaimer. This post may contains affiliate links, and I will be compensated if you purchase through one of my links.

If you are a literature lover, you very well remember the iconic quote of William Shakespeare, “ Brevity is the soul of wit.”

So eloquently put.

Be it life or in writing, there is a great importance of brevity. More the inner clarity and wisdom, brevity strikes in your words, in your simplicity, and in your life too.

Brevity means not beating around the bush and discarding the unnecessary and always conveying in short, precise, yet meaningful words.

Brevity is indeed the ‘soul of wit.’

Not just that, wisdom literature in both the east and west has so much emphasis on the brevity of life.

Our brevity quotes collection is sure to charm the reader and inspire to imbibe the quality of brevity. Always on point and brief. Less confused and more clarity in daily living.

Best Brevity Quotes and Sayings

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.
– Hector Hugh Munro

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it?
– Stephen King

The brevity of life is grace to walk on your own path.
– Lailah Gifty Akita

The fewer the words, the better the prayer.
– Martin Luther

This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.
– Rudyard Kipling

There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.
– Josh Billings

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.
– Rudolf Virchow

If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.
– Michael R. Burch

The little things are what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.
– Antonio Porchia

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.
– Hosea Ballou

Let those who thoughtfully consider the brevity of life remember the length of eternity.
– Thomas Ken

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
– Walter Pater

If human lives be, for their very brevity, sweet, then beast lives are sweeter still.
– Isobelle Carmody

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.
– Protagoras

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
– Dorothy Parker

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on.
– Horace

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
– Edsger Dijkstra

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

The more you say, the less people remember.
– Francois Fenelon

Brevities are the golden formations in the quartz of literature.
– James Lendall Basford

Never be so brief as to become obscure.
– Tryon Edwards

If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.
– Dennis Roth

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
– Dejan Stojanovic

A few sentences are enough to tell the truth.
– Robert Sarah

If you can’t explain something in a few words, try fewer.
– Robert Brault

A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.
– Benjamin Disraeli

No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity.
– Katherine Cecil Thurston

The definition of Brevity: That which people believe would be a virtue – in me!
– Greg Curtis

The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.
– Oliver Markus Malloy

When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.
– William Strunk, Jr.

In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity.
– Pliny The Younger

It is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
– Robert Southey

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone’s saying I love you.
– Judith Viorst

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
– Jean De La Bruyere

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
– John Ruskin

it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.
– Winifred Holtby

Brevity in writing is what charity is to all other virtues – righteousness is nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.
– Sydney Smith

Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity.
– Martial

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is such a great fault to talk too much that, in business and conversation, if what is good is also brief, it is doubly good, and one gains by brevity what one often loses by an excess of words.
– Madeleine de Souvre

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
– Thomas Jefferson

For effective communication, use brevity. Jesus said, ‘Follow me.’ Now that’s brief! He could be brief because of all that he was that he didn’t have to say.
– Jim Rohn