"Never be so brief as to become obscure"
About this Quote
Brevity is a virtue right up until it becomes a moral failure. Hosea Ballou, the Universalist clergyman who spent his life translating big, contested ideas about salvation and human worth into everyday language, isn’t praising long-windedness here; he’s warning against the pious allure of the perfectly clipped phrase. “Never be so brief as to become obscure” reads like a minister’s aside to other ministers, but it doubles as a democratic manifesto: if your words can’t be understood, they can’t serve.
The intent is practical: communicate, don’t perform. In the early American religious marketplace Ballou worked in, sermons weren’t just spiritual guidance; they were public argument and community organizing. Obscurity wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was a barrier that kept doctrine in the hands of the educated and insulated authority from challenge. Brevity, in that light, becomes a kind of clerical shortcut: a way to sound profound while dodging responsibility for being clear.
The subtext is a rebuke to status signaling. Ballou’s line targets the temptation to compress thought into aphorism, to let elegance substitute for precision. He’s insisting on a writer’s and speaker’s duty of legibility: the listener shouldn’t have to decode you like scripture in a dead language. The paradox is the point: the sentence is brief, memorable, and tidy, but it argues for the humility to use more words when the truth requires it.
The intent is practical: communicate, don’t perform. In the early American religious marketplace Ballou worked in, sermons weren’t just spiritual guidance; they were public argument and community organizing. Obscurity wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was a barrier that kept doctrine in the hands of the educated and insulated authority from challenge. Brevity, in that light, becomes a kind of clerical shortcut: a way to sound profound while dodging responsibility for being clear.
The subtext is a rebuke to status signaling. Ballou’s line targets the temptation to compress thought into aphorism, to let elegance substitute for precision. He’s insisting on a writer’s and speaker’s duty of legibility: the listener shouldn’t have to decode you like scripture in a dead language. The paradox is the point: the sentence is brief, memorable, and tidy, but it argues for the humility to use more words when the truth requires it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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