473 Expression Quotes

Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other - it doesn't matter who it is - and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.

The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

There's nothing on my mind that couldn't be expressed by a long insane outburst of hysterical rage.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

The piano is always true to me. In times of despair, happiness, and joy, its mood is always my own.

Let the spirit out - Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one's bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will.

The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world, to state in aesthetic creation the deepest psychic and personal experiences of a human being. It is to enable those experiences to be intelligible and generally recognized within the total framework of an ideal world.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

It is not about which artist is more skilled than which other artist. It is about creating what is in you to create. A lack of confidence in oneself is like a thief, It steals from the world that which might be worthy.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.

Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

My show is my statement. What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.

I don't make love by kissing, I make love by dancing.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

'I am reminded of a comment made shortly after the death of Elvis Presley by a musician he had worked with. He pointed out that despite an impressive vocal range of two and a half octaves and something approaching perfect pitch, Elvis was perfectly willing to sing off-key when he thought the song required it. Those off-key notes were art.'

'He had a musically textured rhythmic voice that had emotional intelligence; concentrate on his voice: sweet, remorseful, defiant, suggestive'

'Elvis' range was about two and a quarter octaves, as measured by musical notation, but his voice had an emotional range from tender whispers to sighs down to shouts, grunts, grumbles and sheer gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to fear. His voice can not be measured in octaves, but in decibels; even that misses the problem of how to measure delicate whispers that are hardly audible at all.'

'He treats the song as a private meditation, full of pain and the yearning to believe. Though the lyrics speak of hope, Elvis turns them into a cry, as if reaching for one last sliver of light in engulfing darkness. 'I am alone', he seems to be saying. But maybe, just maybe, we can find someone or something to cling to. In his case, it's God. But each of us, hearing him, reaches for our own salvation; if great art needs nakedness (then), those few minutes of Elvis alone at the piano amount to the most naked performance I've ever witnessed.'

Her poetry is the diary or autobiography - though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth - of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute.

It is the Frenchman's readiness to exaggerate that is at the root of his intellectual lucidity and also of his capacity for acknowledging merit. The English were not afraid to exaggerate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were then not far behind the French in the lucidity of their thinking.... There is hardly a single instance of cultural vigor marked by moderation in expression.

In his countenance this person read an expression of no-encouragement towards his venture.

He [ Titian ] is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias, one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand than to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion.

They say that truth is naked. I cannot admit this for any but abstract truths; in the arts, all truths are produced by methods which show the hand of the artist.

Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

Rat shit, bat shit, dirty old twat! 69 assholes tied in a knot! Hooray! Lizard shit! Fuck!

Civil limitation daunts His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he.

The ambition of the Irish is to say a thing as everybody says it, only louder.

'It makes blood shoot out of my eyes.'

It taught me that I had a lot more discipline than I thought; a lot more patience. [I became] more expressive, not only personally with my family, but in my music and my way of communicating.

'What an unutterable catastrophe!' The apothecary always had the proper expression ready, whatever the occasion.

Singing is what you do when you want to make a noise but haven't got anything much to say.

I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I'll wait until November And sing a song of gray.

Art is a fruit that grows in man.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings.

I had this dance in me for a long time,and I had to put it into La joie de vivre. It was like a rhythm within me that carried me along.

I've had the most extraordinary longing to say 'Bloody Hell'!

Difficile est proprie communia dicere.

I heard the music, and I wrote to it. Some people beat drums. Some people strum guitars. It's all in the music you hear.

I've never set out to teach anyone anything. It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding 'What is today's message?' And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to 'thought for the day.'

'Jesus Marimba!' (From Batman)

'You should have been like NOOOOO!!!'

Come then, expressive silence, muse His praise.

Sighed and looked unutterable things.

He shot out of here like a bat out of a belfry.

This hangnail expression . . .

'B-E-A-utiful.' (Bruce Almighty)

Superficial nonconformism... leaves our rational structures indifferent. Questions of moral action and of physical appearance are increasingly irrelevant; they are categorized either as justified self-expression or conversely as suitable subjects for agitated public debate. In either case they are harmless vents.

I wouldn't let anybody influence me into thinking I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell and drugs. Because I've always done that, and I always will.

I have come to associate a kind of success that we are referring to, to individuals who have a combination of attributes that are often associated with creativity. In a way they are mutants, they are different from others. And they follow their own drummer. We know what that means. And are we all like that? We are not like that. If you are, then it would be well to recognize that there were others before you. And, people like that are not very happy or content, until they are allowed to express, or they can express what's in them to express. It's that driving force that I think is like the process of evolution working on us, and in us, and with us, and through us. That's how we continue on, and will improve our lot in life, solve the problems that arise. Partly out of necessity, partly out of this drive to improve.

A child laughs when it feels joy and cries when it feels pain. Both things, laughing and crying it does with its whole heart. We all became so tall and so clever. We know so much and we have read so much. But one thing we forgot: to laugh and cry like the children do.

Style is the thought itself.

Get the bow going! Let it scream to me: Violin! Violin! Violin!

I'll kiss the ground. I'll tell my mother, I'll tell my father, I'll tell my loved one, I'll tell my brothers How much I love them.

Stepping out, off the page, into the sensual world. And then our arrows of desire rewrite the speech...

With no words, with no song You can dance the dream with your body on And this curve, is your smile And this cross, is your heart And this line, is your path Oh it's gonna be the way you always thought it would be But it's gonna be no illusion Oh it's gonna be the way you always dreamt about it But it's gonna be really happening to ya...

Feel your hair come tumbling down Feel your feet start kissing the ground Feel your arms are opening out And see your eyes are lifted to God With no words, with no song I'm gonna dance the dream And make the dream come true...

'And now let us play our reeds together.' And they played together. And their music smote heaven and earth, and a terror struck all living things. I heard the bellow of beasts and the hunger of the forest. And I heard the cry of lonely men, and the plaint of those who long for what they know not. I heard the sighing of the maiden for her lover, and the panting of the luckless hunter for his prey. And then there came peace into their music, and the heavens and the earth sang together. All this I saw in my dream, and all this I heard.

The first feminism I expressed was long ago through melodies and rhythms, and a few years later my life caught up.

The melodic curves of speech are an expression of the complete organism and of all phases of its spiritual activities. They demonstrate whether a man is stupid or intelligent, sleepy or awake, tired or alert. They tell us whether he is a child or an old man, whether it is morning or evening, light or darkness, heat or frost, and disclose whether a person is alone or in company. The art of dramatic writing is to compose a melodic curve that will, as if by magic, reveal immediately a human being in one definite phase of his existence.

O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed 'The Mau Maus of East Harlem,' and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: 'He was promising...').

Who hath not proved how feebly words essay To fix one spark of beauty's heavenly ray? Who doth not feel, until his failing sight Faints into dimness with its own delight, His changing cheek, his sinking heart, confess The might, the majesty of loveliness?

Tout silence n'est fait que de paroles qu'on n'a pas dites. C'est pour cela peut-etre que je devins un musicien. Il fallait quelqu'un pour exprimer ce silence, lui faire rendre tout ce qu'il contenait de tristesse, pour ainsi dire le faire chanter. Il fallait qu'il ne se servit pas des mots, toujours trop precis pour n'etre pas cruels, mais simplement de la musique.

I have found solace in profanity unexcelled even by prayer.

The perfection of the means of communication has given [the] average power complex of the human being an enormous extension of expression. (1953)

I wasn't gonna paint. And I wasn't gonna do ostentatious drawings. I wasn't gonna have gallery pictures. I was gonna hide somewhere where nobody would find me and express myself entirely. I'm like a guerrilla warfare in my best books.

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Bang bang bang, on the door baby!

'It's that goddamned motherfucking 'Machine Gun.''

My va-jay-jay is painin'!

What do you mean, 'ah'? Just 'ah.' does every 'ah' have to mean something?

What do I tell him? Tell him that I will see him. She was startled. She was confused. She abandoned words, and sang her confusion. The song was meek and uncontrolled, for she would never be a master, not even a teacher, but wordlessly she asked Nniv why he would even listen to such a man, why he would risk have the rest of mankind think, the songhouse treats all men alike, judging only on merit, not on power - except for Mikal.

Comment voyez-vous cet arbre? Il est bien vert? Mettez donc du vert, le plus beau vert de votre palette; - et cette ombre, plutot bleue? Ne craignez pas la peindre aussi bleue que possible.

As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting. It is indeed the outdoor life - yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow. 'But none of this exists!' 'Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter.' Very subtle, very knowing in her naivete is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me.

[Rock 'n' roll] really is not given to thinking - and resents thinking. Which I believe is the big error of rock 'n' roll. It's always aspired to be the music of the working class. And it's never been looked upon as a vocabulary for art and artistic thinking... We have to be able to expand the vocabulary to express more complex thoughts.