Expression quotes
3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside expression — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley."
"Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic."
"If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream."
"If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things."
"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."
"To have a full stomach, to daze lazily in the sunshine--such things were remuneration in full for his adors and toils, while his ardors and toils were in themselves self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself."
"The greatest of people in society carve niches that represent the unique expression of their combinations of talents. If everyone had the luxury of expressing the unique combination of talents in this world, our society would be transofrmed over night."
"When you boil it down, it's all a visual expression. In a sense we are all storytellers through what we wear, who we want to be, how we want people to perceive us. Life, people and the stories they consciously or unconsciously tell inspire me everyday."
"The perfect expression of receiving a lifetime award is to be working when they're handing it out."
"The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle."
"You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask."
"Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable."
"The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation."
"Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent."
"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being."
"Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express."
"I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling."
"With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards."
"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."
"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."
