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.
Thought cannot conceive of anything that may not be brought to expression. He who first uttered it may be only the suggester, but the doer will appear.
We should also leave behind discrimination, because it is narrow-minded and ignorant, denies contact and warmth; and corrodes mankind's belief that we can better ourselves. The only way to avoid misunderstanding, war and bloodshed is to defend freedom of expression and to communicate with sincerity, concern and good intentions.
Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
One Zen master said, The whole universe is my true personality. This is a very wonderful saying... If you want to see what you truly are, open the window, and everything you see is in fact the expression of your inner reality. Can you embrace all of it?
When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.
It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse-the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
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.
To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.