Quotes About Expression

Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.

There is an image stuck in my mind, but I have no words for it. It gives me no peace. 'Tis a queer backward way of making verse, like going through a door arse first.

I'd like to fuck Andrea Laiacona and see her tits, but I can't get hard and I prefer Big Pharma, anyway! (Color me 'bitch' — I ain't shit !)

Sometimes the best way to communicate something is to explain what happens in the absence of it.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

Be not extravagantly high in expression of thy commendations of men thou likest, it may make the hearer's stomach rise.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

That long drip of human tears.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Silence can mock.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

I'm saddest when I sing.

If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth—as the metaphor of "the marketplace of ideas" suggests—we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens. The same is true of democratic justifications for free speech. If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source.

Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart.

The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.

Sudden glory is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

Only in a spontaneous utterance is there real, uncalculated evidence of enlightenment.)

There is a story that one of the Seven Sages, a man named Liu Ling (ca. 221-330), habitually received guests while completely naked. His response to adverse comment was to declare, "I take the whole universe as my house and my own room as my clothing. Why, then, do you enter here into my trousers."14

The faces of your young people in general are not interesting—I don't mean the children, but the young men and women—and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in the world." "They will all be quaint enough as they get older. You must remember the sort of life they lead. They get their notions very slowly, and they must have notions in their heads before they can show them on their faces.