Quotes About Expression

Could you not portray the good sides of life and proclaim love as a principle, instead of endless bitterness?" There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.

Perhaps a film which strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office.

Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

Fascism was not simply a conspiracy—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation.

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

It is not so much that subjectivity is communicated or expressed by music as that in it, as in a theater, something objective is enacted, the identifiable face of which has been obliterated. It is rather that the orchestra plays within musical consciousness than that a consciousness is projected onto the orchestra.

Important artworks constantly divulge new layers, they age, grow cold and die.

The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him.

L'art est la magie délivrée du mensonge d'être vrai.

It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren't a woman. Weren't even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women.

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

You can't feel yourself blushing. That's lady novelist talk.

When you're a writer, the cure for whatever ails you is always writing.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

It is not surprising that emotion untutored by thought results in nearly contentless blather, in which--ironically enough--genuine emotion cannot be adequately expressed.

the throwing of tantrums must stand guarantor of life's significance and meaning.

Well into her career, painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Léon Frédéric were still churning out the most dreadful pictures of childhood. Such artists strained after emotions, not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel.

Alma-Tadema and Frédéric could paint nothing that was truthful either to the world or to themselves.

The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miró devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express.

more likely that tattooing the name is a substitute for solicitude rather than evidence of it.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question.

George Orwell once said that he wanted to turn political writing into an art: