Quotes About Expression

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal the good one really does.

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

None can imitate life without the intermediary of art.

Who can enjoy acting in an empty theater ?

Of all times in time of war the press should be free.

I want to tell my friends how beautiful / the world is. Not but what they know / it is terrible too--they know as well as I; / but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. / Because they are. And this is what they are; / and because it is and this is what it is. / You are my friend. The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.

It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.

Even when the poet seems most himself… he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

He that sings a lasting songThinks in a marrowbone.

Irish poets, learn your trade,Sing whatever is well made.

Players and painted stage took all my love,And not those things that they were emblems of.

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?

A thoughtOf that late death took all my heart for speech.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mindAnd lost the old nonchalance of the hand;Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,We are but critics, or but half create.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.

The friends that have it I do wrongWhen ever I remake a songShould know what issue is at stake,It is myself that I remake.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth.

Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.