There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.
Sorrowful words become the sorrowful; angry words suit the passionate; light words a playful expression; serious words suit the grave.
[Lat., Tristia maestum
Vultum verba decent; iratum, plena minarum;
Ludentem, lasciva: severum, seria dictu.]
It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one's self anyhow - for the uttered voice so heightens the expression.
In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear.
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for.
Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Almost every cartoonist, when he's sitting down to draw a funny face, if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he's drawing. But when I would write a story - I know it's going to sound almost ridiculous and infantile - I would, in a way, start living it.
Can you also, Lucullus, affirm that there is any power united with wisdom and prudence which has made, or, to use your own expression, manufactured man? What sort of a manufacture is that? Where is it exercised? when? why? how?
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game.
All manners of freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of conscious, freedom of thought...it accepts tolerance. But it is not an atheist society. Religion is the private affair of an individual...be present in the public domain, but state has to be clearly separated from religion. When I'm speaking, I'm speaking only for myself. At the same time, I know that these ideas have wide support among the Iranian population.
The art of art, the glory of expression, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity, and the sunlight of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity-nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness.
Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.
If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.
The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves.