Quotes About Expression

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.

Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.

There is nothing that art cannot express

A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

We should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts decorative arts.

Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before.

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

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

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

No escribo esta carta para poner amargura en tu corazón, sino para arrancarla del mío.

the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

I carry Sorrow, a grey bird, sluggish, in my chest.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.

We meet from time to talk and argue…about what we as artists can do, how we can express the anguish for the moral situation we find in this country, but not as civil rights pleaders.

Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.

In our play we reveal what kind of people we are

et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature.)

or that writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.