Quotes About Expression

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being true.

A curse on every wish that blurs the sight, paralyzes the tongue, cramps the hand, and prevents the truth being seen, said, and written.

Att lämna sitt språk är som lämna sin själ

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.

Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. (The need to lend a voice to suffering [literally: "to let suffering be eloquent"] is the condition of all truth)

Der Versuch, dem objektiven Gehalt Bachs zu seinem Recht zu verhelfen, indem man die subjektive Anstrengung bloß daran wendet, das Subjekt auszumerzen, überschlägt sich. Objektivität bleibt nicht als Rest der Substraktion des Subjekts zurück.