“Do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in few!”

— Pythagoras

Last update Oct. 29, 2021. History

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Pythagoras 121

ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher -585–-495 BC

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“The stamp of great minds is to suggest much in few words; by contrast, little minds have the gift of talking a great deal and saying nothing.”

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Comme c’est le caractère des grands esprits de faire entendre en peu de paroles beaucoup de choses, les petits esprits au contraire ont le don de beaucoup parler, et de ne rien dire.
Maxim 142.
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“Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity.”

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Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.

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On the Ergodic Behavior of Dynamical Systems (LA-2055, May 10, 1955) in [Stanisław Marcin Ulam, Analogies between Analogies, The Mathematical Reports of S.M. Ulam and His Los Alamos Collaborators, University of California Press, 1990, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9g50091s/]