Quotes about Clarity

You'll have a better understanding of what was actually done if you start by knowing what had to be done - what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what's what.

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

Discipline without direction is drudgery.

Without a clear biblical purpose, fasting becomes an end in itself.

Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

It has often been said there's so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is. And that's why your books have such power and strength. You publish with shorth! (Shorth is better than length.)

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind maker-upper to make up his mind

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

Life is filled with problems to be solved and tensions to be managed. Sometimes it helps to know which is which.

You may well have to simplify to live the life God is inviting you to live.