Quotes about Expression

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down...

Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

I hate quotes: tell me what you know.

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.

when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody;

Of all the religions in the world, there is none with the wealth of music that the Christian faith offers.

If you cannot understand me in my speech, how can you understand me in my silence?

If musicians and artists have no absolutes, they end up caring more about the way the thing is told than about the thing itself, and they slide deeper and deeper till it's their means rather than the ends that matter.

Without words life would be inexpressible. Even the best of emotions beg for a verbal expression. That is why the musician reaches not just to the melody but to the romance of language to bring harmony to life.