Source: Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall
Quotes about clarity
A collection of quotes on the topic of clarity, use, other, life.
Quotes about clarity

Nobel lecture as quoted in The Observer (17 December 1978) Variant: "They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff."

“For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.”

Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture, ch. 10 (1993).

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.

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.

“For those who confuse you, recognize that their confusion is theirs and your clarity is yours.”
Source: Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living

“Disappointment leads to clarity, which leads to conviction and true originality.”
“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
Source: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World


“Truth and clarity are complementary.”
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.

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

“Let us look for our light in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.”

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

c. 1946, p. 63-64
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

“Clarity is the good faith of philosophers”
La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes
Maxim 729, Réflexions et maximes ("Reflections and Maxims") (1746).

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

Part I : The Child's Part in World Reconstruction, p. 9
The Absorbent Mind (1949)

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,

Television interview ("On clarity and exact thinking" - available on youtube)
1960s

As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011
after 1930

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

Source: The Akhmatova Journals, Volume I: 1938-1941
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.”

“No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.”
Source: God Help the Child
Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
Source: The Story of the Lost Child

“there's no clarity.
there was never meant to be clarity.”
Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
“The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.”

Quote from: 'Actualités, Fernand Léger', in 'Varietés nr. 1', 1928, pp. 523-524
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

(1847)

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

"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
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 127–128
The "interpretation of Plato" referred to is that of Gerhard Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft (Frankfurt, 1939), p. 301.
Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 168

Quote from his poem 'Sant Sebastia', Salvador Dali 1927 - dedicated to the Spanish poet Lorca; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 46
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29
1920's, My life (1922)
Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 48.
Letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 194
1950s
Daniel Katz (1960). "The functional approach to the study of attitudes". In: Public opinion quarterly, 24 (1960). p. 173
Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XIII: Humanity on Venus; Section 1, “Taking Root Again” (p. 195)

As quoted in The Sufi Path of Love : The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (1983) by William C. Chittick, p. 162
[John M. Ziman, The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of Society, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 0-521-09917-X, 98]