Quotes About Expression

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

But friendship does not express itself in the same way in different people.

That art had become a poor and pitiable thing. It was no longer inhabited by a deep-rooted soul.

Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner,

My words therefore did not reflect my feelings in the least. If the reader has only a faint impression of this, that is because, as narrator, I describe my feelings to him at the same time as repeating my words. But if I were to hide the former from him so that he heard only the latter, my actions, which corresponded so little to my words, would so often give him the impression of strange changes in direction that he would think me almost mad.

To my ear, Bergotte's way of speaking was completely different from his way of writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books. A voice emerges from a mask; unaided, it is not up to showing us immediately a face we have glimpsed naked in a style.

Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

It is true that the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological laws, like physical laws, have a more or less general relevance. And if the appropriate conditions are the same, the same expression lights up the eyes of different human animals, just as the same morning sky lights up places that are remote from one another and have no connection.

Those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

The truth which one puts into one's words does not make a direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible evidence.

La vraie vie, [...] c'est la littérature.

It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.

This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.

blows and shouts being indeed no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet.

I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression.

as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.

Nas?l ki baz? yarat?klar, tabiat?n üretmekten vazgeçti?i bir canl? türünün son örnekleriyse, acaba –dil, kelimeler, dü?üncelerin çözümlenmesi icat edilmemi? olsa–ruhlar aras?nda mevcut olabilecek ileti?imin yegâne örne?i de müzik mi diye dü?ünüyordum. Müzik, devam? gelmemi? bir olas?l?k gibidir; insanl?k ba?ka yollara, konu?ma ve yaz? diline sapm??t?r.

Authentic art does not proclaim itself for it is achieved in silence.

Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

Bressant's voice or of Thiron's in L'Aventurière or in the Gendre de M. Poirier.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in a work for the work to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God is to be found in the denial of Him by the atheist, who considers creation to be perfect enough to dispense with a Creator.

Et elle m'a répondu textuellement : « Il faut toujours dire une chose comme si on était en train de la composer soi-même. » Si vous y réfléchissez c'est monumental, cette réponse !

Although expression may suffice to make us believe in enormous differences between things that are separated by infinitely little—although that infinitely little may by itself create an expression that is absolutely unique, an individuality—it was not only the infinitely little differences of its lines and the originality of its expression that made these faces appear irreducible to