Quotes about brief

A collection of quotes on the topic of brief, briefing, briefs, life.

Quotes about brief

“One swallow does not make a summer,
neither does one fine day;
similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Source: The Nicomachean Ethics

Depressing, Time, Summer, Personality

“We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy. In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

Rousseau's Theory of the State (1873)
Context: We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy. In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant. The democratic regime also lifts the masses up gradually to participation in public life--something the monarchy never does. Nevertheless, while we prefer the republic, we must recognise and proclaim that whatever the form of government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities.
The State is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.

People, Time

“When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.”

Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) Russian ballet dancer

Appearance, Success, Happiness

“In riding to the hounds, in falconry,
In love or war," as anyone will tell you,
"For one brief joy a hundred woes.”

Francois Villon book Le Testament

"De chiens, d'oyseaulx, d'armes, d'amous,"
Chascun le dit a la vollee,
"Pour une joye cent doulours."
Source: Le Grand Testament (The Great Testament) (1461), Line 622.

Love, War, Joy

“In our brief life,
so many roads,
so many miracles
and blessings and glories,
but also so many curses and denials,
grief and contempt,
continuous waves on the planetary seas
that come and go,
and they crawl us into the vast heavens,
n that quiet rhythm universe
listen to your heart beat.”

Alexis Karpouzos movie We are the conversation

The film ''We are the conversation'', gathers together the most famous poems and poets from all over the world. It is a celebration of our linguistic diversity and a reminder of our commonalities and the fundamental role verbal art plays in human life around the world.
Alexis karpouzos

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Wedding, Love, Error

“The trick is to find happiness in the brief gaps between disasters.”

Christopher Paolini book Brisingr

Variant: Misfoutune always comes to those who wait. The trick is to find happiness in the breif gaps between distaters.
Source: Brisingr

Happiness

“One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Source: Journal of a Solitude

Love, Reality, Sense, Time

“What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth.”

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet

Truth, Youth, Spring, Sea

“But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Source: The Glass Menagerie

World, Music, Sex, Dance

“It were a grief so brief to part with thee.
Farewell.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Parting

“… there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

Disease, Soul

“Out, out brief candle, life is but a walking shadow… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Variant: Life... is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Source: Macbeth

Life

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Sense, Light

“Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Life, Success, Joy

“There isn’t time--so brief is life--for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving--and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Letter to Clara Spaulding (20 August 1886)

Love, Life, Time

“People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

People, History, Bird

“For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Never Give All The Heart http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1545/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Source: Poems Context: Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.

Love

“The guy I'd felt such an immediate and deep connection to I'd thought that just maybe there really were such things as soul mates, and had considered, at least for a few brief moments, that he might be mine.”

P. C. Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

Guy, Soul

“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”

Harlan Ellison book Paladin of the Lost Hour

Paladin of the Lost Hour (1985)

Way, Universe, Memory, Time

“Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth, Act V, scene v.
Context: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Life

“I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

World

“The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Stupidity, Intelligence, Reality

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 13 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Death, Hunger, People, Hell

“I say, of the Congress, then, this — that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; — in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

28 August 1893
New Lamps for Old (1893)

Men, Sincerity

“It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging... There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions... It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable... The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity... Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations... get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 291
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Pleasure, Youth, Age

“To dance with the naked [blow-up] doll, that was me! That's what I mean by I'm real, I'm truly hardcore, because I needed the money and I had to work. So if he told me that for me to get paid I had to go out there in bikini briefs and hop on top of this [blow-up] doll and that's how I gotta get paid, and I was homeless at the time, that's what I had to do. But What I did was not let him pimp me, you know what I'm saying. It wasn't like I just did that because that was my order. As soon as I got the check's to say what was on my mind, I said what was on my mind. And we have a platinum record now, you know what I'm saying.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, MTV interview (1994)

Money, Time, Dance

“For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

His entire afterword to The Essential Ellison (1987)
Also quoted in the death announcement made by his publicist (28 June 2018).

Time

“I [[love the mystics…The mystic manages to strip himself of action, of facts, objectives and even the pastoral mission and rises until he reaches communion with the Beatitudes. Brief moments but which fill an entire life. ]] [Mystics] have been fundamental [to the church]. A religion without mystics is a philosophy.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica

Love, Life, Religion

“The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer – except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me – he bears a particular resemblance.”

Francois Villon (1431–1463) Mediæval French poet

Robert Louis Stevenson Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), ch. 6.
Criticism

Life, World, Soul, Idea

“Perez Brignoli, Hector. A Brief History of Central America. Translated by Ricardo B. Sawrey and Susana Strettridi Sawrey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.”

Jose Cecilio del Valle (1777–1996) Honduran politician-

References

History, Universe

“All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort - a sustained effort - to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, A New Beginning (June 2009)

Children, World, Question, Effort

“I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)

Love, People, Problem, Learning

“I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

The Poetic Principle (1850)

Truth, Beauty

“You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion... For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days... He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity... the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space... If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 312
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Age, World, Way

“The earth is brief,
as brief as a man’s solemnity.
………
When you, Earth, stop palpitating in my flesh
I, flesh, will give you all my earth.”

Juan Antonio Villacañas (1922–2001) Spanish poet, essayist and critic

“The Earth and I”, from De-triumphant March (1960)

“But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty. Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i. e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i. e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, (28 December 1846), Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur, Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 38, p. 95; International Publishers (1975). First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol. III, 1912

Life, Men, Truth, World

“How short our span!
If you once realized how brief,
you would refrain
from causing any beast or man
the smallest grief, the slightest pain.”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

Pain

“The grass grows over the graves, time overgrows the pain. The wind blew away the traces of those who had departed; time blows away the bloody pain and the memory of those who did not live to see their dear ones again—and will not live, for brief is human life, and not for long is any of us granted to tread the grass.”

Mikhail Sholokhov book And Quiet Flows the Don

And Quiet Flows the Don (1934)

Life, Pain, Grass, Memory

“In this way, then, by the renewal of the ceaseless working of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in us, in its various stages of progress, shall we be able at some future time perhaps, although with difficulty, to behold the holy and the blessed life, in which (as it is only after many struggles that we are able to reach it) we ought so to continue, that no satiety of that blessedness should ever seize us; but the more we perceive its blessedness, the more should be increased and intensified within us the longing for the same, while we ever more eagerly and freely receive and hold fast the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But if satiety should ever take hold of any one of those who stand on the highest and perfect summit of attainment, I do not think that such an one would suddenly be deposed from his position and fall away, but that he must decline gradually and little by little, so that it may sometimes happen that if a brief lapsus take place, and the individual quickly repent and return to himself, he may not utterly fall away, but may retrace his steps, and return to his former place, and again make good that which had been lost by his negligence.”

Origen (185–254) Christian scholar in Alexandria

On First Principles, Bk. 1, ch. 3; par. 8
On First Principles

Life, Way, Thinking, Time

“In the brief monthly reports of the Security Police, I only want figures on how many Jews have been shipped off and how many are currently left.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

To Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Quoted in "Hitler and the Final Solution" - Page 137 - by Gerald Fleming - History - 1987
Undated

“Feelings were running high, for the conviction of Esterhazy would inevitably lead to a retrial of Dreyfus, an eventuality that the General Staff wanted at all cost to avoid.
This must have led to a brief moment of psychological anguish. Note that, so far, General Billot was in no way compromised. Newly appointed to his position, he had the authority to bring out the truth. He did not dare, no doubt in terror of public opinion, certainly for fear of implicating the whole General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, and General Gonse, not to mention the subordinates. So he hesitated for a brief moment of struggle between his conscience and what he believed to be the interest of the military. Once that moment passed, it was already too late. He had committed himself and he was compromised. From that point on, his responsibility only grew, he took on the crimes of others, he became as guilty as they, if not more so, for he was in a position to bring about justice and did nothing. Can you understand this: for the last year General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible knowledge to themselves?”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Truth, Fear, Justice, Way

“The Esterhazy affair, thus, Mr. President, comes down to this: a guilty man is being passed off as innocent. For almost two months we have been following this nasty business hour by hour. I am being brief, for this is but the abridged version of a story whose sordid pages will some day be written out in full.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Business

“In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

Life, Death, World, Imagination

“Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

Time, Past, Future

“Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.
“Every failure of Earthling leadership has been traceable to a lack on the part of the leader,” says Rumfoord, “of at least one of these three things.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 7 “Victory” (p. 174)

People, World, Religion, Way

“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

Life

“Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word 'justice' into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason… and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 173-174
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Education, Fear, Justice, Hope

“The Spartans meanwhile, man to man, and with their war songs in the ranks, exhorted each brave comrade to remember what he had learned before; well aware that the long training of action was of more use for saving lives than any brief verbal exhortation, though ever so well delivered.”

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

Book V, 5.69-[2]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book V

War, Learning, Training

“I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.
It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

"I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist" (2008)
Context: So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?
More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?
Me, actually — the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.
It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.
I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.

Mountain, Intelligence, Thinking, Sense

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality
Context: We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief.... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.

Age, Communication, Understanding, Nature

“We realized in our hearts that we could not do much till conditions were radically changed-hence our overwhelming desire for independence-and yet the passion for progress filled us and the wish to emulate other countries which had gone so far ahead in many ways. We thought of the United States of America and even of some eastern countries which were forging ahead. But most of all we had the example of the Soviet Union which in two brief decades, full of war and civil strife and in the face of what appeared to be insurmountable difficulties, had made tremendous progress. Some were attracted to communism, others were not, but all were fascinated by the advance of the Soviet Union in education and culture and medical care and physical fitness and in the solution of the problem of nationalities-by the amazing and prodigious effort to create a new world out of the dregs of the old.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book The Discovery of India

The Discovery of India (1946)

Country, War, Heart, Communication

“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Dreams, Loss, Birth

“Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.”

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Way, Bird, Christmas, Dead

“This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.”

Rudyard Kipling Kim

Source: Kim

Life

“I saw my whole life flash before my eyes, boss. It was horrific. I haven’t done anything to regret yet and it’s been way too brief. I at least want a license before I check out, you know?”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Inferno

Life, Way

“[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

Reading

“But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

World, Time

“troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief…”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book North

Source: North

Pleasure

“My brief flash of relief and confidence melted away. Good thing it did, too. I'm sure the world would come to an end if I were allowed to feel a sense of relief and well-being for any length of time.”

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

World, Feeling, Confidence, Sense

“Magnus noticed Maryse and Robert, who did not have the best relationship and hardly ever spoke to each other, having a brief whispered consultation about what YouTube might be.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Born to Endless Night

“Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.”

Frances Mayes (1940) American university professor and writer

Source: In Tuscany

“Apparently deciding Charles’s brief introduction wasn’t good enough, his brother reintroduced himself. “Dr. Samuel Cornick, elder brother and tormentor. Very nice to meet you, Anna—”

Patricia Briggs book Cry Wolf

Source: Cry Wolf

“I have no word of yours to assure me that our brief friendship held for you the same significance it held for me, but I must go on believing so. Every hope of the future is meaningless unless I have faith that you and I will share it together.”

Elizabeth George Speare book Calico Captive

Source: Calico Captive

Friendship, Faith, Hope, Future

“Jackson has devised a game called "Real or Not Real" to help Peeta. He mentions something he thinks happened, and they tell him if it's true or imagined, usually followed by a brief explanation.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Imagination, Game, Thinking, Help

“He was raw and sharp and rich and throbbing with life. He was sweet blood after a long hunt. How could she have mistaken Aiden's kisses for this? They had been delicious and smooth like the brief comfort of chocolate, but they had never been enough.”

Annette Curtis Klause Blood and Chocolate

Source: Blood and Chocolate

Life, Kiss

“Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

On Death and Dying (1969)

Death, Peace, Star, Light

“Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually wracked with pain.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

Love, Men, Pain, Beauty

“I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled.”

Paullina Simons book The Summer Garden

Source: The Summer Garden

Life, Stupidity

“All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake.”

Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) French novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz

Source: Suite Française

Light

“She’d felt more pain from Nico in their brief connection than she had from her entire legion during the battle against the giant Polybotes.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Pain

“Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

Dreams

“There was a brief pause for them to evaluate the full horror of the situation. Magnus. personally, was in horror up to his elbows.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: What Really Happened in Peru

Personality

“This is not a letter but my arms about you for a brief moment.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

“I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Flowers, Heart

“As Nietzsche said, ‘that which doesn’t kill you– ’(Alexion)
Will only require brief hospitalization. And if you’re a Dark-Hunter, just a good day’s sleep. (Danger)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Sins of the Night

Sleep

“He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.”

Michel Houellebecq book Atomised

Source: The Elementary Particles

Childhood

“Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life

“Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?”

Mo Yan book Red Sorghum

Source: Red Sorghum: A Novel of China (1986/1987)

Life, Fear, Autumn, Grass

“You will find joy, frustration and sorrow in your quest. Never forget that friendship and loyalty are more precious than riches… Happiness can be brief, but it knows no time in the land of dreams.”

Brian Jacques (1939–2011) British fiction writer known for Redwall animal fantasy novels

Source: Pearls of Lutra

Friendship, Dreams, Time, Joy

“Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.”

Mark Mirabello (1955) American writer

Source: The Cannibal Within

“The brief silence that follows is as tender as a
rainstorm of daisies.”

Mathias Malzieu book La Mécanique du cœur

Source: La Mécanique du cœur

Silence

“Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.”

Jenna Blum book Het familieportret

Source: Those Who Save Us

Love, Life, Pain

“He so did not sit down and have a proper talk with her. I know it. He probably sent her a brief text, saying, Over. Sam.”

Sophie Kinsella book I've Got Your Number

Source: I've Got Your Number

“Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, and clever.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

Love, Men, Beauty, Season

“A strange, warm feeling swirled in my chest, and for a brief moment, when I looked at him, I saw… safety”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Feeling

“Actually, I'd already briefed him, early this morning. Since we were up at six. Since, at six, the nurse had been overcome with the overwhelming compulsion to take Fang's temperature.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Men, Children, Learning

“Thatʹs a dangerous look,ʺ said Dimitri, giving me a brief glance before returning his eyes to the road.
ʺWhat look?ʺ I asked innocently.
ʺThe one that says you just got some idea.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Variant: That's a dangerous look," said Dimitri, giving me a brief glance before returning his eyes to the road.
"What look?" I asked innocently.
"The one that says you just got some idea."
"I didn't just get an idea. I got aidea.
Source: Last Sacrifice

Idea

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Men, Memory

“I find myself fascinated by a man who admits to enjoying fairy tales and uses the word "impinge"- barely misses a beat while indulging in a brief girl-on-girl fantasy. You're a man of layers, Ford."
Me and Shrek, we're onions.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Tribute

Girl

“Then I lost him for a brief period of time, and by the time I caught up with him, he had wandered into Hyde Park, waded into the Serpetine, spread his arms wide, and was shouting, 'Ducks, embrace me as your king!”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Midnight Heir

Time

“They all deserve to die.
Even you, Mrs. Lovett
Even I.

Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death would be relief.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

Source: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Death

“I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Source: Images: My Life in Film

Dreams, Reality

“I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Source: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Reality

“Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough”

Jeanette Winterson book Gut Symmetries

Gut Symmetries (1997)
Context: They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough.

Life, Beauty, Past

“She had never imagined that the kiss would be so brief and desperate and wild. Or that it would taste of holy water. Holy water and blood.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Imagination, Kiss, Water

“Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Life