Clarity of Thought Quotes

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

I have a flood of ideas in my mind. I just follow my vision.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Ludwig Wittgenstein

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Thinking cannot be clear until it has had expression-we must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in half torpid form. Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flowers. So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development-thought is the blossom; language is the opening bud; action the fruit behind it.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

I would rather stand alone in the light of truth than in the crowd filled with error.

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.

Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.

Strength of mind rests in sobriety; for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.

Genius: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!

I think possibly what people working for one hate the most is indecision. Even if I'm completely unsure, I'll pretend I know exactly what I'm talking about and make a decision. The most important thing I can do is try and make myself very clearly understood.

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

Sometimes it is necessary to make things clearer than the truth.

The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.