Expressive Power Quotes

C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

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.

When musicals don't work, they really don't work. But when they work, and someone is singing because they can't speak anymore, or they're dancing because they can't move anymore, moving is not enough to express - it's this beautiful thing.

I've just simply used what I've used because of the great, great expressive potential of it.

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.

Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background.

Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.

Music is powerful. It is the only thing that can speak into your mind, your heart and your soul without your permission.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Beauty lies in nature and reveals, once the artist has perceived it, its own expressive power.

I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.

Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years.

What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality.

Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin. Now, they are so subtle, they can milk you with two notes. They can make you feel like they told you the whole universe. But I don't know that yet. All I got now is strength. Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I'll get it.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.

A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.