Aneurin Bevan Quotes

Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.

If your own mind is muddled, much more will the minds of your hearers be confused.

Nothing is confused except the mind.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

But intolerant,narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host,change form,and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

If you have a clear mind . . . you won't have to search for direction. Direction will come to you.

A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

Clarity of mind, body and spirit is the key to creativity.

If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.

That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.

When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

The mind has to be empty to see clearly.

You people have no imagination!

Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.

I think better when I'm not sober

One must confront vague ideas with clear images.

If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.