“Do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in few!”
The Paris Review interview
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.
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)
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/]
“It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.”
Letter to James McHenry (10 August 1798)
1790s
§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 14 : Peculiar Conduct of a Personage
“No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Source: Dynamics Of Theology, Chapter Eight, Symbolic Religious Communication, p. 147
