Expression Quotes

Speak to me as to thy thinkings,As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughtsThe worst of words.

It's okay to send flowers, but don't let the flowers do all the talking. Flowers have a limited vocabulary. About the best flowers can say is that you remembered. But your words tell the rest.

Love is trusting, accepting, and believing, without guarantee. Love is patient and waits, but it's an active waiting, not a passive one. For it is continually offering itself in a mutual revealing, a mutual sharing. Love is spontaneous and craves expression through joy, through beauty, through truth, even through tears.

O, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast,Who plead for love, and look for recompense,More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.

He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him

Without freedom there is no art.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

Learn to express rather than impress. Expressing evokes a 'me too' attitude while impressing evokes a 'so what' attitude

At the top of your lungs, shout and listen to the echoes. You must live life at the top of your voice!

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.

Painting is a jeu d'esprit.

A look which reveals inward stress adds more beauty to the face, no matter how much tragedy and pain it bespeaks; but the face which, in silence, does not announce hidden mysteries is not beautiful, regardless of the symmetry of its features.

[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal.

I love the musical form of books. It's a different way of doing things, it's very beautiful. You're able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck - why not do them?

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

I will be free, even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

To love is to act.

I don't think that anything anyone has to say should ever be censored or unheard

Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.

Why then we should drop into poetry.

The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.

My favorite thing in the world is telling stories, and most of what I do is telling stories through music.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

Let each moment be guided by positive purpose. And let your whole life express the beauty of who you truly are.

And of course there must be something wrongIn wanting to silence any song.

If I had to give up performing, it wouldn't bother me too much. But I couldn't live without my writing. I put all my feelings, my very soul, into my writing. I tell the world in my songs things I wouldn't even tell my husband.

The whole end of speech is to be understood.

Singing is a lover's thing.

Say it to them. Or say it to yourself in the mirror. Say it in a letter you'll never send or in a book millions might read someday. I think you deserve to look back on your life without a chorus of resounding voices saying 'I could've, but it's too late now.'

All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out.

Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

The rabble also vent their rage in words.[Ger., Es macht das Volk sich auch mit Worten Lust.]

Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

It dances today, my heart,like a peacock it dances,it dances.It sports a mosaic of passions like a peacock’s tail,It soars to the sky with delight, it quests,Oh wildly, it dances today, my heart,like a peacock it dances.

Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.

Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty

Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.

I feel that I speak the musical language.

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural.

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow.

Music is the perfect type of art.

All action is of the mind and the mirror of the mind is the face, its index the eyes.

Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter.

True observation begins when devoid of set patterns; freedom of expression occurs when one is beyond system.

What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.