Expressive Quotes - Page 3

• In contemporary music, the challenge for me is to make the recorder sound as naturally expressive as, for example, the violin - without doing it too much and forcing the instrument. It is very easy to be overly expressive on the recorder, and finding the balance is quite difficult.

  Michala Petri

  Challenges, Balance, Too Much

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• The expressive techniques of painting are capable of conveying an analogy but not an impossible photograph of a moment.

  Edouard Vuillard

  Technique, Analogies, Impossible

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• Usually they are quick to discover that I cannot see or hear.... It is not training but love which impels them to break their silence about me with the thud of a tail rippling against my chair on gambols round the study, or news conveyed by expressive ear, nose, and paw. Often I yearn to give them speech, their motions are so eloquent with things they cannot say.

  Helen Keller

  Dog, Giving, Silence

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• Robert DeNiro, who may be the greatest living actor, usually acts in a way which is very stone-faced, like Steve McQueen. For example, Steve McQueen, if you cut the sound, you don't know what he's acting really. He gives to the lines, to the text, something very special, and he's very good. He was a great actor. But, to do a silent movie, you have to have more expressive actors.

  Michel Hazanavicius

  Cutting, Giving, Acting

  "Director Michel Hazanavicius THE ARTIST Interview". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. November 26, 2011.

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• What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.

  Camille Saint-Saens

  Expression, Two, Giving

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• The complaints of contemporary writes, who deplore the increase of luxury and deprevation of manners, are commonly expressive of their peculiar temper and situation. There are few observers who possess a clear and comprehensive view of the revolutions of society, and who are capable of discovering the nice and secret springs of action which impel, in the same uniform direction, the bland and capricious passions of a multitude of individuals.

  Edward Gibbon

  Spring, Nice, Passion

  Edward Gibbon (1828). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.501

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• The expressive word "quiet" defines the dress, manners, bow, and even physiognomy of every true denizen of St. James and Bond street.

  Nathaniel Parker Willis

  Bows, Dresses, Quiet

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• Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action. ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.

  John Carroll

  Self, Political, Theatre

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• The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.

  Henri Matisse

  Play, Space, Empty

  Henri Matisse, Susan Lambert, Victoria and Albert Museum (1981). “Matisse lithographs”

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• Daily, from sunrise to sunset, the radio, newspapers and magazines broadcast to the world how to maintain health, how to regain health... the conflicting information, expressive of the different opinions of these various health authorities, has proved to be nothing less than confusion.

  Joseph Pilates

  Sunset, Confusion, Sunrise

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• Alto (saxophone) is just a very hard instrument; there's so few people that play it really well. I feel it's the best one, too, now. At first I didn't feel that way; I wanted to be a tenor player. It took a long time for me to feel that alto was the most expressive of the saxophones.

  Art Pepper

  Player, Long, People

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• It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language. Any concept, whether or not it forms part of the system of grammatical categories, can be conveyed in any language. If a notion is lacking in a given series, it implies a different configuration and not a lack of expressive power.

  Edward Sapir

  Patterns, Different, Would Be

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• When we are playing [games], we are stretching our emotional expressive ranges, loosening up our biochemical flow of information, getting unstuck, and healing our feelings.

  Candace Pert

  Healing, Emotional, Playing Games

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• It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

  Clay Shirky

  Historical, Expansion, Generations

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• If you are an expressive player, people can feel that. It is an emotional thing and becomes an extension of yourself.

  Gary Moore

  Player, Emotional, People

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• The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

  Rachel Cusk

  Mother, Wine, Reality

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• Self-painting is a further development of painting. The pictorial surface has lost its function as sole expressive support. It was led back to its origins, the wall, the object, the living being, the human body. By incorporating my body as expressive support, occurrences arise as a result, the course of which the camera records and the viewer can experience

  Gunter Brus

  Wall, Self, Support

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• Hogarth ranks among those pictorial creators who have discovered the expressive force of the brushstroke as well as of color and its harmonies. He makes his entry into art as a reflection of Hals and Velasquez.

  Rene Huyghe

  Art, Reflection, Color

  René Huyghe (1962). “Art Treasures of the Louvre: Including a Short History of Painting in Europe from Cimabue to Toulouse-Lautrec”

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• Sweet baby Jesus, Blue Eyes was... He was gorgeous in all the ways that made girls do stupid things. He was tall, a good head or two taller than me and broad at the shoulders, but tapered at the waist. An athlete's body - like a swimmer's. Wavy black hair toppled over his forehead, brushing matching eyebrows. Broad cheekbones and wide, expressive lips completed the package created for girls to drool over. And with those sapphire-colored eyes, holy moley...

  J. Lynn

  Girl, Sweet, Baby

  J. Lynn (2013). “Wait for You (Wait For You, Book 1)”, p.2, HarperCollins UK

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• I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Law, Keys

  Steven Pinker (2007). “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature”, p.282, Penguin

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• Human beings do not wish to be modest; they want to be as expressive - that is, as immodest - as fear allows; fashion helps them solve that paradoxical problem.

  Edward Sapir

  Fashion, Wish, Want

  Edward Sapir, David Goodman Mandelbaum (1985). “Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality”, p.380, Univ of California Press

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• Donald Judd spoke of a 'neutral' surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used 'non' or 'not' - expressive - this is an early problem - a negative solution or - expression of new sense - which can help one into - what one has not known. 'Neutral' expresses an intention.

  Jasper Johns

  Thinking, Expression, Negative

  "Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews". Book edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Christel Hollevoet, 1996.

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• What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beautiful, Childhood, Theatre

  Charles Baudelaire (1919). “Baudelaire, His Prose and Poetry”

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• A work of art in paint should be beautiful and expressive as abstract colour and form and should not interest us necessarily in any 'story' outside of itself - or else it belongs to the field of illustration.

  John F. Carlson

  Beautiful, Art, Illustration

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• In TheColorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving.

  Madison Smartt Bell

  Honesty, Moving, Book

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