Quotes About Expression

An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

One does not write solely for oneself, or solely for truth, but not simply for others either. One writes. That is all, and in doing so one aims at all of that at once. Those who write imply that all of this can happen in the same movement.

I cut straight through the scribbling to the book, because I have built up in myself a strange expressive organism which can not only interpret the conventional meaning of the book's words and techniques but can even allow itself to be transformed and endowed with new organs by the book.

Philosophy, precisely as 'Being speaking within us,' expression of the mute experience by itself, is creation. A creation that is at the same time a reintegration of Being...for...it knows itself to be a Gebilde and wishes to surpass itself as pure Gebilde, to find again its origin. It is hence a creation in a radical sense: a creation that is at the same time an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation...Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

The adoption of a level presupposes the expressive relation between the perceived and ourselves, presupposes our settling into it, that is to say, the raising of certain of its elements to the status of dimensions...The sensible thing speaks a certain language to us which we understand just as if a linguistic agreement were established between our perceptual system and it, as if we spoke its language without having learned it = expression.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

Far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective.

One reason why the painter takes up his brush is that in one sense the art of painting still remains to be created...Painting is always something to be created.

Saussure may show that each act of expression becomes significant only as a modulation of a general system of expression and only insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures. The marvel is that before Saussure we did not know anything about this, and that we forget it again each time we speak--to begin with when we speak of Saussure's ideas.

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

There is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those which I would like to give to myself.

My clothes can become appendages of my body.

Life is not only an organization for survival; there is in life a prodigious flourishing of forms, the utility of which is only rarely attested to and that sometimes even constitutes a danger for the animal...Adaptation is not the canon of life, but a particular realization in the tide of natural production...It can be perfectly argued that life is not uniquely submitted to the principle of utility, and that there is a morphogenesis in the design of expression.

The derangement of the senses is to break through the partitions between them in order to regain their indivision--And through this, a thought not mine but theirs...Things speak through me.

Anyone who thinks about the matter finds it astonishing that very often a good painter can also make good drawings or good sculpture. Since neither the means of expression nor the creative gestures are comparable, this fact is proof that there is a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses—a conceptless presentation of universal Being.

Perception is already expression.

Since perception itself is never complete, since ?ur perspectives give us a world to express and think about which envelopes and exceeds those perspectives, a world which announces itself in lightning signs as a spoken word or as an arabesque, why should the expression of the world be subjected to the prose of the senses or of the concept? It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken ?nd recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen.