This depends not only on the clearness but also on the vivacity of your thoughts... without clearness the children of the mind, thoughts and judgments, cannot be brought into the world... at times obscurity is convenient if you wish to avoid vulgarity; yet how shall the audience understand one that connects no definite idea with what he says?
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
A thought that cannot be expressed clearly might as well not exist, because it never makes it out of your head and into the world where it could act. Expressiveness has two parts: clearness, so the idea is understood, and vivacity, so it is felt and remembered. Many capable people are bottlenecked here, full of good judgment they cannot deliver, like a vessel with a wide mouth and a narrow spout. The maxim also punctures a comfortable illusion: obscurity is sometimes mistaken for depth, and confused speakers are venerated precisely because no one can pin down what they mean. That reverence lasts exactly until someone understands them. Real depth survives being made clear. Aim to be understood, and let vivacity make the understanding stick.
Practice
- Work on the spout, not just the reservoir; a good idea badly expressed loses to a lesser one delivered clearly (maxim 130 makes work legible).
- Add vivacity to clarity: the concrete image, the sharp example, the memorable phrasing that makes an understood idea also stick.
- Distrust your own admiration for the obscure; if you cannot restate a thinker plainly, check whether the depth is real or just fog (maxim 143 warns against paradox-for-effect).
Use this when
- Use this whenever your ideas must move others: proposals, teaching, leadership, writing; the clearest version wins.
- Use it as a diagnosis when your good ideas keep failing to land; the bottleneck is usually expression, not substance.
Ignore this when
- Don't confuse expressiveness with over-simplifying; clarity serves the idea, it does not flatten it (maxim 105 keeps it brief, not thin).
- Don't chase vivacity into showmanship that outruns the substance; the point is delivering a real idea, not performing (maxim 141 warns against self-audience).
A picture of it
So densely does a researcher write and speak that reviewers assume there must be depth they are missing, and for a while the obscurity even earns a kind of awe. Then a competitor publishes the same insight in plain, vivid terms, and the field attaches the discovery to the version it can actually understand, along with the credit and the citations. He had the idea first and could not get it out of his own sentences. Obscurity had bought him reverence only until someone made the thing clear, and clarity was what finally let the idea live and act.
An idea that cannot be made clear cannot act. Obscurity impresses only until it is understood; clarity is what lets the thought live.