A wise exlibran challenged me to identify who
was first to excuse himself for the length of a letter because he
didn't have time to write a short one.
I can trace the quotation to Blaise Pascal, and a similar quote to St.
Augustine: however, the quotation supposedly goes as far back as the
time of Cicero. Can anyone identify the source?
"Je N'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir
de la faire plus courte.--I have only made this letter rather long
because I have not had time to make it shorter." Pascal. Lettres
provinciales, 16, Dec.14,1656. Cassell's Book of Quotations,
London,1912. P.718.
Most people would say that Blaise Pascal coined the phrase; however, in
a 1991 post in the Humanist Archives, Jim Marchand says the quote goes
back at least to the time of Cicero:
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 91 19:44:02 CST
From: (James Marchand) <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: long letter
We had a posting in French some time back on the question of the
sentence: I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a
long one. As is usual with such quotations, attribution is a problem,
because of what Merton called "the palimpsesting syndrome." In Der
grosse Duden, vol. 2 "Stilwoerterbuch," 1963, p. 14 one reads: "Der
junge Goethe schreibt ein- mal an seine Schwester: 'Da ich keine Zeit
habe, Dir einen kurzen Brief zu schreiben, schreibe ich Dir einen
langen,' ein Gedanke, den er uebri- gens bei Cicero aufgelesen hat." So
the saying goes back at least as far as Cicero, definitely earlier than
Pascal. Where Cicero got it nemo scit.......... Jim Marchand
.............................................
Using a German online dictionary, I was able to decipher that Goethe
wrote a letter to his sister that was similar to Pascal's letter. Der
grosse Duden, a German-English book of quotations published in the 1960s
(?), dates the quotation to the time of Cicero, but does it provide a
source for the quotation?
While I can't go back as far as Cicero, and don't have access to Der
grosse Duden, I can cite a similar quote from St. Augustine (A.D 400):
Letter LIV. to His Beloved Son, Januarius, Augustin Sends Greeting in
the Lord:
"In regard to the questions which you have asked me, I would like to
have known what your own answers would have been; for thus I might have
made my reply in fewer words, and might most easily confirm or correct
your opinions, by approving or amending the answers which you had given.
This I would have greatly preferred. But desiring to answer you at once,
I think it better to write a long letter than incur loss of time....."
http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF1-01/npnf1-01-23.htm
Until a scholar can identify the quote to the days of Cicero, I would
credit Pascal (love his Thoughts) with originating the quote. Although
St. Augustine's quote is similar, his excuse for the length of the
letter is based more on lack of information than on lack of time or
thought.
In researching this challenge, I came across an offshoot of Pascal's
quote that was also contained in Cassell's Book of Quotations (p.376):
"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make
it short." Thoreau. Letter to a Friend.
Jerry Morris
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