Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
...which probably didn’t help your efforts, because translations vary and are often reworded slightly to suit the tastes of the quoter.
But I recalled that it was about a letter, and googling on letter shorter longer was sufficient to find the attribution. Perhaps my mind was already well-primed for finding relevant quotes and this illustrates well why I feel almost palpably stupider without internet access.
I misremembered the quote as involving an apology for the length, so my searches focused on the word “apologize”. But it didn’t matter in the end—you were my external brain. ;-)
Well, via Wikiquote the exact wording is:
...which probably didn’t help your efforts, because translations vary and are often reworded slightly to suit the tastes of the quoter.
But I recalled that it was about a letter, and googling on letter shorter longer was sufficient to find the attribution. Perhaps my mind was already well-primed for finding relevant quotes and this illustrates well why I feel almost palpably stupider without internet access.
I misremembered the quote as involving an apology for the length, so my searches focused on the word “apologize”. But it didn’t matter in the end—you were my external brain. ;-)