Expression Quotes

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In a society where dissenting viewpoints are suppressed, those viewpoints are potent and dangerous... Where dissent is tolerated, it rapidly becomes quaint and is viewed as un-sophisticated; people merely amuse themselves with the expression of contrary opinion.

To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.

Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs.

The film resonated deeply with 13-year-old boys. It seemed to give expression to all their insecurities and fears. It is about a teenage boy who's lost his dad, his mom and his older brother, and I think the whole story is his coping with this great loss by fantasizing about death and this ominous figure who strides through your life quite unpredictably and more than decimates it. It dealt in a very entertaining way with a subject that haunts all of us at the back of our minds.

A word does not start as a word — it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which dictates the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist; it is repeated inside the actor.

Those skilled in mathematical analysis know that its object is not simply to calculate numbers, but that it is also employed to find the relations between magnitudes which cannot be expressed in numbers and between functions whose law is not capable of algebraic expression.

Antoine Augustin Cournot

The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade everyone and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.

Randolph Bourne

As many know, the Chinese expression for "crisis" consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for "danger," the second the symbol for "opportunity."

When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film. I never think ahead of the shot I'm going to make the following day because if I did, I'd only produce a bad imitation of the original image in my mind. So what you see on the screen doesn't represent my exact meaning, but only my possibilities of expression, with all the limitations implied in that phrase. Perhaps the scene reveals my incapacity to do better; perhaps I felt subconsciously ironic toward it. But it is on film; the rest is up to you.

Michelangelo Antonioni

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

Devils and demons have no objective existence. They have always represented, again, portions of mankind's own psychological reality that to some extent he had not assimilated — but in a schizophrenic kind of expression, projected instead outward from himself.

The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

Erwin Schrödinger

That strategic rivalry in a long-term relationship may differ from that of a one-shot game is by now quite a familiar idea. Repeated play allows players to respond to each other's actions, and so each player must consider the reactions of his opponents in making his decision. The fear of retaliation may thus lead to outcomes that otherwise would not occur. The most dramatic expression of this phenomenon is the celebrated "Folk Theorem." An outcome that Pareto dominates the minimax point is called individually rational. The Folk Theorem asserts that any individually rational outcome can arise as a Nash equilibrium in infinitely repeated games with sufficiently little discounting.

To our western eyes, the painted images are the most prominent component of a corpus of artistic expression. This Western bias, a particularly Eurocentric bias, has been pervasive and deep.... it has resulted in a lack of attention to, and concern about, prehistoric art of equal and sometimes greater antiquity in eastern and southern Africa.

If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?

Stephen Jay Gould

It may be granted that Debussy's melodic line is very fluid and elastic, like Wagner's "continuous melody," not definitely sectionalized by balanced phrases or set cadences. But it surely has its own right to existence—music being pre-eminently the art of freedom—and let us remember that Nature herself has melting outlines, shadowy vistas and subtle rhythms. Debussy, in fact, is the poet of the "indefinite" and the "suggestive" and his music has had great influence in freeing expression from scholastic bond.

Walter Raymond Spalding

The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.

Josiah Gilbert Holland

The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure – roads, bridges, schools, Internet – off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein's manuscript to the Annalen der Physik.

Charles Krauthammer

"The law is an expression of God's holy will and as such must be honored and loved," said the preacher piously.
"Rubbish," said the Master. "The law is a necessary evil and as such must be cut down to the barest minimum. Show me a lover of the law and I will show you a muttonheaded tyrant."

Anthony de Mello