Quotes About Expression

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know...

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk to much.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

To describe adequately is the high power & one of the highest enjoyments of man. She was beautiful and he fell in love with her. The thing has happened to millions, yet how few can tell the story. Try some of them, set them at the painting; each knows it all & can communicate nothing. Then comes Shakspeare [sic], & tells it point for point as it befel [sic], or better; and now we have two things, love & literature.

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the singer sings from a sense of duty or from seeing no way of escape, I had rather have none.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative man.

Speech is power; speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This

The man is only a half himself, the other half is his expression