Quotes about clarity

A collection of quotes on the topic of clarity, use, other, life.

Quotes about clarity

“You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.
You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation
at high speed with total clarity.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Source: Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

Carl von Clausewitz photo
Isaac Bashevis Singer photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Subh-i-Azal photo

“Glorified art Thou, O God my God! I indeed testify to Thee and all-things at the moment when I am in Thy presence in pure servitude, upon this, that verily Thou art God, no other God is there besides Thee! Thou art unchanged, O my God, within the elevation of Grandeur and Majesty, and shall be unalterable, O my desirous boon, within the pinnacle of power and perfection inasmuch as nothing shall frustrate Thee and nothing shall extinguish Thee! Thou art unchanged as Thou art the Capable above Thy creation and Thou art unalterable as Thou indeed shall be as from before inasmuch as nothing is with Thee of anything and nothing is in Thy rank of anything! Thou accomplisheth and willeth and doeth and desireth! Glorified art Thou, O God my God, with Thy praise, salutations be upon the Primal Point, the Chemise of Thy Visage and the Light of Thy direction and the Luminosity of Thy Beinghood and the Clarity of Thy Selfhood and the Ocean of Thy Power by all that which Thou hath bestowed upon Him of Thy Stations and Thy Culminations and Thy Foundations, for nothing shall frustrate Thee of anything and nothing shall extinguish Thee of anything! No other God is There besides Thee, for verily Thou art the Lord of all the worlds! And blessings, O God my God, be upon the one who was the first to believe in Thee, the Visage of Thy Selfhood and the Decree of Thy direction; and upon the one who was the last to believe in Thee, the Essence of Thy direction and the Visage of Thy Holiness; and upon those whom Ye have made martyrs/witnesses (shuhadá’) unknown except by Thy Command nor restrained except by Thy Wisdom; then upon those to whom Ye have promised that Ye shall make Him manifest on the Day of Resurrection and He whom Ye will upraise on the Day of the Return by all which Thou will bestow upon Him of Thy Power and Thy Strength, for nothing shall extinguish Thee and nothing shall frustrate Thee! Ye determine all-things, for verily Thou art powerful over whatsoever Thou willeth! And I indeed testify, O my God, between Thy hands that verily there is no other god besides Thee and that He whom Ye shall make manifest on the Day of Resurrection is the Chemise of Thy Creativity and the Visage of Thy Manifestation and the direction of Thy Victory and the substance of Thy Pardoning and the branch of Thy Singularity and the clarity of Thy Unicitarianism and the Pen [of the Letter] Nún (al-qalam al-nún) within Thy Beinghood and the setting of the Cause-Command within Thy Essentiality inasmuch as there is no difference between Him and Thee except that He is Thy servant in Thy grasp, such that whatsoever is in the Heavens and the earth and what is between them will then be filled by His Name and by His Light until it be made apparent that no other god is there besides Thee and no Beloved is there like unto Thee and no Desired One is there other than Thee and no Dread is there of Thy like and no Justice of Thy equal! No other god is there besides Thee! Glorified art Thou, O God, and by Thy praise, blessings, O my God, be upon the Guide to the Throne of the Hidden Cloud and the Path to Thy Presence in the Sina'i of Authorization and the Caller by Thy Logos-Self and the Crier of Thy Permission between Thy Hands and the Ariser of Thy Attendance by Thy Command; then the Triumph, O my God, by all that which Thou will bestow upon Him of Thy Power, then that which will be made manifestly apparent of the Word upon the earth and what is upon it by Thy grandeur, and also in this that nothing shall ever put out His Light! Verily nothing shall frustrate Thee of anything and nothing shall extinguish Thee of anything! Thy mercy encompasseth all-things and verily Thou art powerful over what Ye have willed; and to the one who prays to Thee, Hearing, Answering, for verily Thou art Observant over us, and verily Thou art High, Praised beyond that which the inner hearts can comprehend!”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Ethics of the Spirituals

Yi-Fu Tuan photo
Thomas Sankara photo

“I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organization we deserve victory. … You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. … We must dare to invent the future.”

Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) President of Upper Volta

From 1985 interview with Swiss Journalist Jean-Philippe Rapp, translated from Sankara: Un nouveau pouvoir africain by Jean Ziegler. Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions Pierre-Marcel Favre, 1986. In Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-87. trans. Samantha Anderson. New York: Pathfinder, 1988. pp. 141-144.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo
Thomas Mann photo

“Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Source: The Beloved Returns (1939), Ch. 7
Context: Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.

Billie Joe Armstrong photo
Sadhguru photo
Barbara Marciniak photo

“For those who confuse you, recognize that their confusion is theirs and your clarity is yours.”

Barbara Marciniak (1928–2012)

Source: Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living

C.G. Jung photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”

Cal Newport (1982) American computer scientist

Source: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Blaise Pascal photo
Douglas Adams photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Patti Smith photo
Niels Bohr photo

“Truth and clarity are complementary.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

As quoted in Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism : Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000) by Christopher Norris, p. 234
Variant: Opposites are complementary.

Bertrand Russell photo

“I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions … I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available; but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. … The kind of philosophy that I value and have endeavoured to pursue is scientific, in the sense that there is some definite knowledge to be obtained and that new discoveries can make the admission of former error inevitable to any candid mind. For what I have said, whether early or late, I do not claim the kind of truth which theologians claim for their creeds. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed. I should be much surprised if subsequent research did not show that it needed to be modified. I hope, therefore, that whoever uses this dictionary will not suppose the remarks which it quotes to be intended as pontifical pronouncements, but only as the best I could do at the time towards the promotion of clear and accurate thinking. Clarity, above all, has been my aim.”

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

Preface to The Bertrand Russell Dictionary of Mind, Matter and Morals (1952) edited by Lester E. Denonn
1950s

Joseph Joubert photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Jonathan Ive photo

“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Ive explaining the design philosophy behind iOS 7 in its product video, shown at WWDC 2013.

Albert Einstein photo
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues photo

“Clarity is the good faith of philosophers”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes
Maxim 729, Réflexions et maximes ("Reflections and Maxims") (1746).

Angela of Foligno photo
Aleksandr Pushkin photo
Paul Valéry photo

“What is there more mysterious than clarity?… What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over hours and over men?”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Socrates, p. 107. Ellipsis in original.
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Maria Montessori photo
Glenn Gould photo
Julian Assange photo

“The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence. You're not swept up in the trivialities of a nation. You can concentrate on the serious matters.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

The secret life of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 22, 2010, 2010-06-17 http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-secret-life-of-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-20100521-w1um.html,

Bertrand Russell photo
Edvard Munch photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo

“With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind.”

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind.
The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull. Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets.
The stars shine in my brain; ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head; songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.

Barack Obama photo

“The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality or universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before, but they are no less important.”

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

2013, Eulogy of Nelson Mandela (December 2013)
Context: The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality or universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before, but they are no less important. For around the world today, we still see children suffering from hunger and disease. We still see run-down schools. We still see young people without prospects for the future. Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs, and are still persecuted for what they look like, and how they worship, and who they love. That is happening today. And so we, too, must act on behalf of justice. We, too, must act on behalf of peace. There are too many people who happily embrace Madiba’s legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality. There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people. And there are too many of us on the sidelines, comfortable in complacency or cynicism when our voices must be heard.

Germaine Greer photo

“When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

"Introduction," p. xxii
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Context: While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.

Etty Hillesum photo
Eckhart Tolle photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo

“How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
1980s
Source: EWD648.

Jonathan Stroud photo
Alice Sebold photo
Stephen R. Covey photo
Anthony Bourdain photo

“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom… is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

No Reservations - Machu Picchu
Context: It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

Ani DiFranco photo
Anna Akhmatova photo
Michael Ondaatje photo
Cecelia Ahern photo
Michael Ondaatje photo

“If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Atul Gawande photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
Toni Morrison photo
Gary Zukav photo
Anne Lamott photo

“But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Patrick Rothfuss photo

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

Source: The Story of the Lost Child

Julian Barnes photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Stephen King photo
Charles Bukowski photo

“there's no clarity.
there was never meant to be clarity.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Vincent Van Gogh photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Harlan Coben photo
Shannon Hale photo
Fernand Léger photo
Michel Foucault photo
Friedrich Engels photo
Dick Cheney photo

“I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U. S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U. S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

At the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991 http://web.archive.org/web/20041130090045/http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/soref/cheney.htm
1990s

Eugene V. Debs photo

“Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

"A Plea for Solidarity," The International Socialist Review VOL XIV No. 9 (March 1914) https://books.google.com/books?id=olFIAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA534&ots=GTTSOWeGxG&dq=eugene%20v.%20debs%20%22a%20plea%20for%20solidarity&pg=PA534#v=onepage&q&f=false

Alastair Reynolds photo
Salvador Dalí photo
Marc Chagall photo
Henri Nouwen photo
Carl Schmitt photo
John Ruysbroeck photo
Bill O'Neill photo

“Value-expressive attitudes not only give clarity to the self-image but also mold the self-image closer to the heart’s desire.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Daniel Katz (1960). "The functional approach to the study of attitudes". In: Public opinion quarterly, 24 (1960). p. 173

Rumi photo

“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it.
Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

As quoted in The Sufi Path of Love : The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (1983) by William C. Chittick, p. 162

“A new scientific theory is seldom stated with such clarity by its original author, and usually takes many years to creep into public conciousness.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

[John M. Ziman, The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of Society, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 0-521-09917-X, 98]

Susan Neiman photo

“Those who cannot find [moral clarity] are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.”

Susan Neiman (1955) American academic

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (2008)

Jack Kerouac photo