Quotes About Expression

If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.

Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Poets are thus liberating gods.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine

Materialists speak of the power of people in masses—nations, societies, classes, institutions. Idealists speak of the power of individuals, measuring people by the strength of spirit they exude. According to idealists, mind is the fundamental reality—the ground of all being—and everything else is its reflection. Everything in nature is an expression of the universal mind.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The telltale body is all tongues.

I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw everything, why draw anything?

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down...

Lo que haces resuena con tal fuerza por encima de tu cabeza, que no me deja oír lo que dices.

Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.

In the words of a great writer, we find our own neglected thoughts.

La naturaleza nos dotará del uniforme de prisión del partido al que nos adherimos.

Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?

Literature is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two

I hate quotes: tell me what you know.

If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset.

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.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.