“Do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in few!”
Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
“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.”
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)
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François de La Rochefoucauld156
French author of maxims and memoirs 1613–1680Related quotes
“To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.”
Arthur Conan Doyle book A Study in Scarlet
Source: A Study in Scarlet
Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
"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.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist
Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), p. 113
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician
On Horace Walpole (1833)
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer
"...like captured fireflies" (1955); also published in America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (2003), p. 142
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician
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/]