Expression quotes
3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Such expression is impossible in a cramped atmosphere. As I have no desire to offer civil disobedience I cannot write freely. As the author of satyagraha I cannot, consistently with my profession, suppress the vital part of myself for the sake of being able to write on permissible subjects. ... It would be like dealing with the trunk without the head."
"One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects."
"All satyagraha and fasting is a species of tyaga. It depends for its effects upon an expression of wholesome public opinion shorn of all bitterness."
"He was smiling again, his face alight, and Ivy knew her own expression was a mirror to his. Ivoleyn, he said, softly now, as if testing the word. And she replied, Dashton. Then their hands parted, but only so they might come closer, like two trees twining together to stand as one in a forest of green."
"True expression is hard when performing opera. The problem is that opera relies on the dramatic context of the piece. It can be interpreted and represented, but there are guidelines; there is a vocabulary within the pieces that you must know objectively and reflect."
"What we all desire is the fullest, highest expression of ourselves."
"Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me."
"The super-salesman neither permits his subconscious mind to "broadcast" negative thoughts nor give expression to them through words, for the reason that he understands that "like attracts like" and negative suggestions attract negative action and negative decisions from prospective buyers."
"Two months ago my mother died. She made, as the expression goes, a good death."
"You cannot fight against it. There's a price you have to pay for fame, and people who don't want to pay that price can get in trouble. I accepted the idea of celebrity because of a French expression: 'You cannot have the butter and the money for the butter.'"
"Attention has its most powerful expression in purposeful action."
"I don't at all care who's on the right or left or in the center. Even though we use them, even though I use them myself, these expressions have lost all meaning."
"I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul."
"It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression."
"How is Marxist-Leninist theory to be linked with the practice of the Chinese revolution? To use a common expression, it is by "shooting the arrow at the target". As the arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are "shooting without a target", shooting at random, and such people are liable to harm the revolution."
"This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone."
"The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves."
"Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad."
"The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need."
"Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them."
