52 Ideas for Simple Content from Einstein, da Vinci & Shakespeare
Do you think experts are working overtime to make marketing seem more and more complicated? I do. Avoid needless complexity and you’ll simplify content marketing.
Focus on fundamentals. To make your content marketing great, keep it simple!
Here are 52 quotes about simple content I’ve collected over the years.
These words come from my heroes: content kings like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Woody Guthrie, Will Rogers and Dr. Seuss. Plus content queens like Gertrude Stein, Ann Handley and Kristina Halvorsen.
These ideas for your content marketing are totally worth stealing … and Tweeting!
Simplify Content Marketing by Keeping It Simple
“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
Gertrude Stein
“Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
Albert Einstein
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
Charles Mingus
“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.”
Martin H. Fischer
“The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity.”
Robert Stuberg
“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”
Woody Guthrie
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
Hans Hofmann
“If you can’t explain it to a 6-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Albert Einstein
“No one will ever complain that you’ve made things too simple to understand.”
Ann Handley
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci
On Keeping It Short
“Speak concisely, say much in few words.”
Sirach 32:8
“I try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”
Elmore Leonard
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
Thomas Jefferson
“If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.”
David Belasco
“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”
Truman Capote
“The best sentence? The shortest.”
Anatole France
“More is almost never more.”
Kristina Halvorson
“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.”
Abraham Lincoln
“He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.”
John Ray
“The letter I have written today is longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal
“You don’t have to say everything to say something.”
Beth Moore
“When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.”
William Shakespeare
“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
George Orwell
“If you have nothing to say, say nothing.”
Mark Twain
“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
Jules Renard
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
Hunter S. Thompson
“Less is more.”
Robert Browning
“The best sentence? The shortest.”
Anatole France
“Use the smallest word that does the job.”
E.B. White
“As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.”
Mark Twain
“Be grateful for every word you can cut.”
William Zinsser
“The shorter and the plainer the better.”
Beatrix Potter
“Men of few words are the best men.”
William Shakespeare
“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
On Speaking Clearly
“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
William Butler Yeats
“Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.”
William Penn
“One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.”
Quintilian
On Choosing Simple Words
“Don’t use words too big for the subject.”
C.S. Lewis
“I love words but I don’t like strange ones. You don’t understand them and they don’t understand you. Old words is like old friends, you know ’em the minute you see ’em.”
Will Rogers
“Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all.”
Winston Churchill
“Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific term or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”
George Orwell
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Mark Twain
“Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who instead of aiming a single stone at an object takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.”
Samuel Johnson
“The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.”
Hippocrates
“The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.”
Somerset Maugham
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
Dr. Seuss
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
William Strunk and E. B. White
“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men’s minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully.”
Cicero
“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”
Alexander Pope
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone.”
Stephen King
“Say what you have to say, and then stop.”
Rudolph Flesch
So it seems, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”
If your content marketing’s getting complicated, here are 3 ways to simplify it:
- Simplify your content marketing strategy with a 1-page strategy.
- Simplify your message with a 1-page Message Map.
- Simplify your writing with global English.
Want to simplify your content marketing? Write me: george@crystalclearcomms.com
George Stenitzer
As a marketing change agent, I consult with clients, lead content marketing workshops for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and write the weekly Simplify Marketing blog.
With experience from Fortune 500 companies such as AT&T, RR Donnelley and Tellabs, I've been named:
- Content Marketer of the Year by the Content Marketing Institute.
- Best Marketer by BtoB magazine.
- A B-to-B CMO to watch by Fierce CMO.
