Quotes About Expression

Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I don't play accurately--any one can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.