alt Hacker NewsThis could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.
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tudelo • today at 7:30 AM
Writing is fluff. What do you want, a list of bullet points? There would be no books. Maybe you have a career in writing 2 page books?
You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is entirely poetry, specifically songs, though in many cases we do not know the tune that they were set to), you'll see that Hebrew poetry relied on repetition. For example, here's the King James Version's translation of the famous "to every thing there is a season" passage from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, which most translations render as poetry:
> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.