Quotes About Expression

Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.

Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

How clever are you, my dear! You never mean a single word you say!

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Harry, said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, 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. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.

What are you? To define is to limit.