Expression Quotes

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Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man.

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job.

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

Scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the robust form and the vivid colouring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolic expression.

James Clerk Maxwell

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

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.

In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true.

William Henry Maule

In its most beautiful expression and sublimest manifestations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a world-wide love, in place of the narrower human love of home and children.

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 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

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 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

Artistic expression might be seen as a Darwinian protection device for the psyche of fragile individuals, for whom sensuous contact with the outside world is too much to bear, and is repressed, and must be brought up and thrust out into the open from time to time at great effort in order for them to simply survive emotionally.

With an effort Ewing turned his gaze away from the far end of the bar. Slowly he spread out his hands on the table and examined them. Then he looked up at Wayne. His left eyelid had begun to quiver slightly like a leaf in a gentle breeze as he put the question, but the expression of his face remained unchanged. "Who's the new customer?" Ewing asked indolently.

"Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson." "Lake and Palmer?" "Ralph and Waldo."

What puzzles me most is your criticism that he showed 'no sense of engagement'. I haven't met the expression before, and feel bound to comment on its totalitarian tang. Engagement not with the truth as the speaker apprehends it, but with the alleged opinion of the majority of listeners.

Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.

Look, we're trying to explore other options to your retirement," the whitecoat said. "You might be useful to us in other ways." Because we're not that useful dead,"Nudge said thoughtfully. No," I agreed. "Well, maybe as doorstops." The whitecat made an "eew" expression. Or those things in a parking lot that show where the cars should stop," suggested Iggy. He closed his eyes and went stiff, to demonstrate what it would look like. Also an option.

James Patterson

The reckoning with idealism as a view of life is universal, but it also touches on something central in art-its life's substance. One must understand that it is impossible to distinguish between a picture's form and its substance. As the flower's structure is governed by the intentional tension (when it loses the sap the form is lost), so also with art the substance creates the tension. Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.

Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.