Quotes About Expression

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.

but the beauty of the youngest was so wonderful that the poverty of language is unable to express its due praise.

I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped. The thing is to free ones self; to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. (Diary 4: 187)

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

Neither male nor female language adequately grasps the fullness of the divine reality (Gregory Nazianzus, Orat. 27; John of Damascus, OF 1.4–8).

The Christ event did not in that sense CHANGE the will of God, but rather it more clearly expressed God's eternal will toward the whole of history.

The quality of your being expresses the correctness of your understanding. Think

The magic of a face.

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

Sarcasm is the language of the devil, for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Silence is as deep as eternity; speech, shallow as time.

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead therefore we must learn both arts.

know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice)

The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.

Carlyle thought little of these Essays. "Wretched lives" is his best word for them when he is bilious and the world is all gloom; but when in another place he confesses that he was seldom happier than when writing them, we may take his condemnation as he did his bile, "with a drop of oil and a grain of salt.