The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

The line praises verbal economy: the rarest “talent” is not ornament or eloquence, but disciplined restraint—choosing the single precise word instead of padding thought with redundancy. Read this way, it is a maxim about clarity and intellectual honesty: concise language forces the writer to know what they mean and makes it harder to hide vagueness behind verbosity. It also implies an ethical dimension to style—respect for the reader’s time and attention. In quotation culture it is often invoked as a rule of good prose, aligning with broader Enlightenment ideals that valued reasoned, plain expression over rhetorical excess.