Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Hope

Anthony Hope’s line is a polite barb aimed at the literary vanity that never goes out of fashion: the habit of confusing obscurity with depth. The conditional clause, “Unless you are a genius,” is doing the heavy lifting. It concedes, with a raised eyebrow, that some rare minds can bend language into knotty shapes and still illuminate something essential. For everyone else, opacity is just fog - a performance that asks the reader to do the writer’s job.

The advice lands because it’s less about simplifying ideas than about respecting the social contract of prose. “Aim at being intelligible” frames clarity as an aspiration, not a default setting. Intelligibility takes craft: choosing the right frame, pacing, and detail so the reader can follow the argument without being spoon-fed. Hope’s subtext is editorial as much as artistic: if your sentence requires a decoder ring, it’s not necessarily profound; it may simply be sloppy, self-protective, or status-seeking.

Context matters. Hope made his name in late-Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction, a marketplace where readability wasn’t a sin but a requirement. His era also nursed a counter-impulse: the prestige of difficulty, the feeling that serious art should resist the masses. Hope quietly punctures that pose. He’s not attacking ambition; he’s attacking the shortcut of sounding smart. The real flex, he implies, is being understood on purpose.