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.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
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.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
“Do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in few!”
"Philip of Pokanoket : An Indian Memoir".
A more extensive statement not found as such in this work is attributed to Irving in Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book (1923) edited by Roycroft Shop:
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)
Variant: Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it.
“A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”
4
Les Caractères (1688), De la société et de la conversation
Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), p. 113
On Horace Walpole (1833)
"...like captured fireflies" (1955); also published in America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (2003), p. 142
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/]
