"You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length"
About this Quote
Gauss isn’t apologizing for slowness; he’s flexing a standard. The line reads like a polite note, but it’s really a manifesto for compression: the idea that the highest form of clarity is achieved only after ruthless subtraction. In mathematics, where a proof lives or dies by what it excludes, “a few words” isn’t a stylistic preference. It’s a claim about truth: if you can’t say it cleanly, you don’t fully own it.
The sly twist is the reversal of common sense. Most people treat brevity as efficiency and length as labor. Gauss flips that, exposing verbosity as the path of least resistance: you can always keep talking, layering caveats and examples until the argument feels safer. Concision forces you to commit. It also forces the reader to meet you halfway, which is part of the power move. Gauss is signaling that he writes for peers who value density over hand-holding, not for an audience that needs the ramps built.
Context matters: this is a 19th-century mathematician whose work set standards for rigor, not a motivational poster about productivity. “As much as possible in a few words” echoes the era’s ideal of elegant form, but with Gauss’s particular severity. The subtext is almost ethical: precision is a kind of respect - for the subject, for the reader, and for the author’s own reputation. When he says brevity takes longer, he’s admitting the hidden labor behind “effortless” brilliance.
The sly twist is the reversal of common sense. Most people treat brevity as efficiency and length as labor. Gauss flips that, exposing verbosity as the path of least resistance: you can always keep talking, layering caveats and examples until the argument feels safer. Concision forces you to commit. It also forces the reader to meet you halfway, which is part of the power move. Gauss is signaling that he writes for peers who value density over hand-holding, not for an audience that needs the ramps built.
Context matters: this is a 19th-century mathematician whose work set standards for rigor, not a motivational poster about productivity. “As much as possible in a few words” echoes the era’s ideal of elegant form, but with Gauss’s particular severity. The subtext is almost ethical: precision is a kind of respect - for the subject, for the reader, and for the author’s own reputation. When he says brevity takes longer, he’s admitting the hidden labor behind “effortless” brilliance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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