Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux Quotes

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

Whate'er is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.

Whatever is clearly expressed is well wrote.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

Sound judgment is the ground of writing well.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

I never want to confuse people or go over their heads.

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected.

Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts.

If you can find interesting ways to be clear, you're really onto something.

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

To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.

The simpler the message, the broader the meaning, in many respects.

I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.