Quotes about Expression

When she said to him once It looks as if it was painted! it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.

In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women's faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.

He hasn't written a line for twenty years. A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years? Wade surprised him. The real kind, I should say.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

Whatever our monument might be, we want it to be public, even if the public is one friend.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them.