# Clarity

Clarity is the state, or measure of being clear, either in appearance, thought or style; lucidity. Its synonyms are clearness, obviousness and transparency.
Arranged alphabetically by author or source: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Anonymous · See also · External links

## A

* It was Sophie who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in perfect equilibrium.
** Jean Arp in Concise Dictionary of Women Artists, p. 652.
* Since lives and liberties depend upon clarity, not obfuscation, and reason, not hyperbole, let me take this opportunity today to be clear: The Justice Department is working to protect American lives while preserving American liberties.
** John Ashcroft, in Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government's Violation of ..., p. xi.
* Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?
** Matthew Arnold, in The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature, p. 187.
* 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.
** Julian Assange, in Globalization and Citizenship, p. 68.
* Perhaps his greatest intellectual virtue was his unremitting adherence to clarity and to rational argument. His work is without allusions ...
** Alfred Jules Ayer, in A. J. Ayer's Philosophy And Its Greatness

## B

* Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
** Melody Beattie, in Breast Cancer Wellness Magazine.
* Your mind, while blessed with permanent memory, is cursed with lousy recall. Written goals provide clarity. By documenting your dreams, you must think about the process of achieving them.
** Gary Ryan Blair, in 7 A Useful Guide to Goal Setting, p. 7.

## C

* Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.
** Karl von Clausewitz, in A Reader in International Relations and Political Theory, p. 150.
* My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.
** Fernando J. Corbató, in Computers, Ethics, and Social Values, p. 430.

## D

* When at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy – which could happen to any one of us – we can react in two ways. Obviously we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, and unending sadness. Or else, we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that has hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.
** Dalailama, in Moments of Clarity, Volume 3, p. 20.
* It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.
** Rene Daumal, in East Asian Labor and Employment Law: International and Comparative Context, p. 237.

## E

* Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo.
** Albert Einstein, in Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism ..., p. 48.
* This way of deducing and discovering new truths from old ones, and the extraordinary clarity and self-evidence of the theories and the ingenuousness of the ideas had an irresistible fascination for me.
* Ferdinand Eisenstein, in Driven to Innovate: A Century of Jewish Mathematicians and Physicists, p. 86.
* It's amazing the clarity that comes with psychotic jealousy.
** Rupert Everett, in Sleepless in La: Revised Edition, p. 99.

## F

* I have assimilated Western thought and its clarity, but, in fact, I am solidly rooted in the passive Eastern nature and remain rebellious to any action.
** Leonid Feodorov, in Exarch Leonid Feodorov: Bridgebuilder Between Rome and Moscow, p. 181.

## G

* I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
** Vincent van Gogh, in The Quotable Intellectual: 1,417 Bon Mots, Ripostes, and Witticisms for ..., p. 12.
* My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
** Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, in I Don't Want to Go to Church!: Practical Ways to Deal with Kids and Religion ..., p. 5.

## H

* Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
** Aldous Huxley, in Fanatically Formative: Successful Learning During the Crucial K?3 Years, p. 113.
* Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.
** Richard Holloway, in God's Priorities for Your Life for Teens, p. 307.

## I

* Natural, reckless, correct skill; Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity. The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change. One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.
** Ikkyū, in deep kyoto good places – good people: Ikkyu
* 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.
** Jonathan Ive, in IPhone and IPad Apps for Absolute Beginners, p. 5.

## J

* There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars...But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too faast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable...It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
** Kay Jamison, in Raw Edge of Purgatory: I Survived the Liberian Pogrom, p. 34.
* Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good. One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them.
** Joseph Joubert, in The Bloomsbury Review, Volume 5, Parts 3-6, p. 125.

## K

* To follow implies not only the denying of one's own clarity, investigation, integrity and honesty, but it also implies that your motive in following, your motive is a reward.
** Jiddu Krishnamurti, in This Light in Oneself: True Meditation, p. 18.

## L

* For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.
** Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in Broaden the Path, p. 178.
* I have assimilated Western thought and its clarity, but, in fact, I am solidly rooted in the passive Eastern nature and remain rebellious.
** Leonid Feodorov, in Exarch Leonid Feodorov: Bridgebuilder Between Rome and Moscow, p. 181.

## M

* Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.
** Michel de Montaigne, in The Necessity for Ruins, and Other Topics, p. 4.
* Christian action in the world will not be sustained or carried on in an intelligent and effective manner unless it is supported by doctrinal convictions that have achieved some degree of clarity.
** John Macquarie, in Methods in the Madness: Diversity in Twentieth-Century Christian Social Ethics, p. 266.
* Increasingly, and often to our surprise, we respond to difficult situations with calmness, clarity and directness. A quiet fearlessness or ...
** Ken McLeod, in Awakening Compassion

## N

* Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.
** Friedrich Nietzsche, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 172.
* Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?
** Pablo Neruda, in Libro de Las Preguntas, p. 35.
* But the clarity and the clearness of Truth and Wisdom maketh him to see and to bear witness that he is made for Love, in which God ...
** Julian of Norwich, in "God is Endless, Sovereign Truth, --Wisdom, --Love, Not-Made ...

## O

* Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the Most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any Motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
** George Oppen, in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, p. 90.

## P

* Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.
** Blaise Pascal, in Lives That Made a Difference, p. 78.
* Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what he loves.
** Blaise Pascal, in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, p. 544.
* The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
** Ezra Pound, in Quotes about Intelligence and Intellectuals, p. 12.
* In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values.
** Tom Peters, in Total Quality of Management, p. 108.

## R

* Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.
** Jim Rohn, in Technical Support Essentials: Advice to Succeed in Technical Support, p. 79.
* When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.
** Jules Renard, in Unmasking Your Future: Tools for Creating Your Best Life, p. 14.
* 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.
** Jalal ad-Din Rumi, in The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 162.
* There their naked understanding is in penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun.
** John Ruysbroeck, in Opera Omnia, p. 144.
* The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all ...
** Mark Rothko, in Mark Rothko: A Biography, p. 246.
* By sheer force of moral purpose, by clarity of perception, by mastery of detail and benign manipulation of men, he had become, as Henry Adams (the famed historian who deplored Roosevelt) admiringly wrote him, “the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon”.
** Theodore Roosevelt, in Strategic Organization Development: Managing Change for Success, p. 68.

## S

* Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.
** Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Articles by, about, or with Rafe Martin
* A man's clarity of judgment is never very good when you're involved, and as you grow older, and as you grow more involved, your clarity of judgement suffers.
** Leó Szilárd, in BUlletin of the Atomic Scientists Feb 1979, p. 38.

## T

* In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements.
** Yi-Fu Tuan, in Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics Nature And Culture, p. 221.
* The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, [says Trudell, with a slight grin], will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.
** John Trudell, in La Puerta, Taos: The Art of Fetching Sky, p. 180.
* His means that he possesses clarity and precision as to the objectives, purposes or aims that he desires for himself and his group, and that he holds these deeply enough and ...
** Ordway Tead, in The A.M.E. Zion Quarterly Review, Volumes 104-106, p. 23.

## U

* Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
** John Updike , in The New York Public Library Literature Companion, p. 71.

## W

* The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
** Bill Watterson, in Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic, p. 29.
* In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember, that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
** Alfred North Whitehead, in Understanding Infinity: The Mathematics of Infinite, p. 13.
* For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.
** Robert Charles Wilson, in Spin, p. 92.

## Z

* Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
** William Zinsser, in Writing to Clients and Referring Professionals about Psychological .., p. 164.
* A framework as it applies to enterprises is simply a logical structure for classifying and organizing the descriptive representations of an enterprise that are significant to the management of the enterprise as well as to the “enterprise's systems” with the aim of “rationalising the various architectural concepts and specifications in order to provide for clarity of professional communication, to allow for improving and integrating development methodologies and tools , and to establish credibility and confidence in the investment of systems resources.
** John Zachman, in Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation, p. 502.

## Anonymous

* We may recognise in our immediate experience that deep down we have the qualities of clarity, awareness, sensitivity, warmth and love, but according to the Buddhist tradition, we have little idea at the outset just how deep and vast those qualities can be. They are none less than expressions of our Buddha Nature, our Awakened Heart.
** Quoted in Discovering the Heart of Buddhism What are the teachings?
* The diamond-like clarity of the materials can only have come from being written by someone deeply inspired at the time and being later polished with care.
** Quoted in "Discovering the Heart of Buddhism What are the teachings?"
* Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.
** In Shubnell's Profound Thoughts, Book 1, p. 66.