Quotes About Expression

Every idea that is articulated becomes a political idea because it is always objectified within an existing community.

If we want people to think, we must also want their thoughts to be communicated; and we must support a political constitution that confirms the public nature of thought.

An idea that is not expressed, that is not or cannot be communicated, is no idea at all.

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

let's get, emotional girls to all wear mood rings

Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.

Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses.

Painting is the grandchild of Nature.

Ik was een naakte letter zonder alfabet

Niet te geloven dat ik knaap nog een vers schreef over de zilverwitheid van een berkestam en om mij heen grootse dronkenschap van de bevrijding: het water was whisky geworden. Alles zoop en naaide, heel Europa was een groot matras en de hemel het plafond van een derderangshotel. En ik bedeesde jongeling moest nodig de reine berk bezingen en zijn bescheiden bladerpracht.

I do not wish to talk about myself because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

Elle pleurait des mots qui se mélangeaient les uns aux autres.

It's funny, I've decided 'Hallelujah' is a kind of Rorschach test for people, because everyone has a different reaction to it and to what I'm doing. I just sang it, and whatever came out was just natural and spontaneous and maybe that's the best thing, because there's a kind of enigma, both in the meaning of the words and the way Leonard Cohen said them, that catches people's attention.

I believe in the magic and authority of words.

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proof.

L'acquiescement éclaire le visage. Le refus lui donne la beauté.

Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.

Being made up of distinctions, language finds it almost impossible to express undifferentiation.

for there are things for which a symbolical mode of expression properly so called is the only one possible, and which will consequently never be understood by those for whom symbolism is a dead letter.

mieux vaut, pour la renommée d'un philosophe, inventer une erreur nouvelle que de redire une vérité qui a déjà été exprimée par d'autres.