"Self-expression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the tenor of Agatha's last letter, of the last self-expression of that effigy upstairs who (you could see) knew everything and was ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Elizabeth Barrett, appearance; Aurora Leigh; on Keats; on the poet's age; content with his own time; democracy; eyes; habitat; health, humanitarianism, inferiority to his creations, inspiration, love, morals, pain, personality, religion, resentment at patronage, self-consciousness, self-expression, sex, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... he hesitated a moment, and she watched pityingly the struggle he was making toward an impossible self-expression. The thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling so pathetically in the inarticulateness of his feeling, would not, she knew, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the woman who spends her days looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends, neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... burden to that brave soul seemed sacrilege or worse. True enough, he was passing through the new and thrilling experience of making acquaintance with his father. But old Grant Maitland was a hard man to know, and they were too much alike in their reserve and in their poverty of self-expression to make mutual acquaintance anything but a slow and in ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... open the postern; and the Duke, as he stepped across the threshold, thrilled with a romantic awe. Re-emerging a moment later into the moonlight, he felt that she had been right about the box: it was fatal to self-expression; and he was glad he had not tried to speak on the way from the Front Quad: the soul needs gesture; and the Duke's first gesture now was to seize Zuleika's ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... required in the pupil, however valuable it may be as an additional means of self-expression; it is, however, absolutely necessary for the successful teacher of rhythmic gymnastics, who must be able to express, on some instrument—most conveniently the piano—whatever rhythms, simple or compound, he may ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... see if I can tell you," said Peter. "Self-expression is a part of every man's duty. Inside we are all trying to be ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... of self-expression, and as she yielded to it her cheeks burned suddenly and her eyes shone between their ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... leave out several pages here. If you realize Aunt Caroline at all, you will see that at least so much self-expression is necessary before anyone else can expect a chance. Time enough to pick up the thread again when the inevitable has happened and her exhausted vocabulary is ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... great advantage in that it lessens the possibility of startling noises which would distract the child from the contemplation of its qualities. By its use, he is first led to observation, and then to self-expression. As the simplest type-form as well as the most universal, it offers a satisfactory basis for the classification of objects in general; while its indefiniteness and adaptability make it a useful medium for the expression of the child's vague ideas. With ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... requires a background of history and tradition; more than that, it requires leisure. A new nation spends its energies in the struggle for existence, and not until that existence is assured do its finer minds need to turn to literature for self-expression. As Poor Richard put it, "Well done is better than well said," and so long as great things are pressing to be done, great men will do their writing on the page of history, and not on papyrus, or ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... is composed of atmosphere, example, and ideals. All these are provided for the growing child by others. He has little or no voice in saying what they shall be. And environment has more to do with the progress of the soul toward full and free self-expression even than what is called education. Education is more by atmosphere, example, and mental suggestion than by teachers and text-books. When we speak of nurture we usually think of the period of discipline in school and church; ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... well-nigh impossible to attempt any explanation of the many styles, from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, which are commingled, superimposed even, without any feeling in the mind of the architect, for the time being, except that of the imperious need for self-expression, regardless of the fashions of his predecessor. In the great western facade this mingling of the styles is most observable. The angle towers are absolutely unlike, the arches are broken, the pinnacles are smashed short off, niches are mutilated, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... literature in the mass has taken centuries to come within sight of the secret that the most intimate form of truth is the most interesting, he went, in his one collection of essays, so far towards absolute self-expression that our practice is still in the rear of his, which is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our bonne foi is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most sincere even in his stratagems, the ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... much moved by her recollections, heeded not my inquiry. All her mental energy was concentrated on the nature of that memorable glance. The general tradition of mankind teaches us that glances occupy a considerable place in the self-expression of women. Mrs Fyne was trying honestly to give me some idea, as much perhaps to satisfy her own uneasiness as my curiosity. She was frowning in the effort as you see sometimes a child do (what is delightful in women is that they so ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... himself matters? Indeed he does, and to the extent that it is not the declaiming of what may be called a sermon that makes a man a preacher, but the man who, through self-expression, by being what he is, makes such an utterance preaching. First ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... heroes. I think that it should be one of the crowning achievements of biography to communicate to the reader certain actual vibrations of the enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philosopher for truth; the patriot for his country; the artist for beauty and self-expression; the altruist for humanity; the discoverer for knowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred soul; the prophet, martyr, or ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the next turn of the wheel might carry her down again. Laughter had softened her lips and hung mischievous lights in her eyes; happiness had set her nerves tingling and set roses blooming in cheeks and lips. The smoldering fires of self-expression, smothered so long, burst into riotous flame. With utter abandonment she flung herself into the merriment of the moment, romping through the dances with any one who asked her, slapping the face of an elderly knight who went too far in his gallantries, dancing ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... expression—the life of activity—is the only life. Our happiest moments are when we forget self in useful effort. He held that every man should sing, speak, paint or carve—this that he might taste the joys of self-expression. Constantly he affirms that this expression of our highest and best is Paradise. He combats the idea of Dante that Heaven and Hell are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the products of his needle were appreciated by his contemporaries, even if he himself did not set great store by them. He began to etch early in life: he ceased only when his eyesight failed. He found in etching a congenial and natural means of self-expression. His artistic fecundity threw them off in regal profusion. The mood seized him: he would take a prepared plate, and sometimes, having swiftly spent his emotion, he did not trouble to do more than indicate the secondary incidents in a composition. Often he gave them ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... madness to keep this book. I know that. It is documentary evidence against me. But I have never shrunk from taking risks. And I feel an urgent need for self-expression.... The book will only be taken ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... instincts. They have no diffidence before the great facts of life. And having this franchise in their pockets, so to speak, this permanent pass to every quarter of the City of the World, having this animal candour of outlook, they are naturally inarticulate. They are easily misunderstood because self-expression is foreign to them and they have no interest in abstract propositions as such. They pick up a phrase and play with it for a while, just as a kitten will play with a ball, or a puppy will walk round with a piece of wood in his mouth, pretending it is a bone. My brother was a good example, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... few truly great stylists that England has produced since the time of Anne. One can easily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upon a youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. They swept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood—a mediaeval, Rhenish Catholicism;—more, they filled him with a new and eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, a ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... inexpressible world. The language of everything in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over our heads—with its cunning little stars in it—is the height of absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when we look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose that He could express Himself in it, or that any one ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... independent of all traditions, makes it difficult to estimate our present indebtedness to Greece in matters of religion. It would be difficult even if the industrial revolution had not taken place. The northern Europeans have hardly yet attained to self-expression. Their religion is a mixture of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew elements which refuse to be harmonized, and which in this country sometimes clash with the ideal of a gentleman, that lay religion of the English-speaking peoples, which has no longer any connexion with heraldry or property ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of each trade department. Various phases of work in dressmaking, electric power operating, novelty, and millinery are made "centers of interest." Each girl thus finds her art aiding her to be more valuable in her trade. Her enthusiasm is awakened and she is stimulated to self-expression directly along the line of her chosen work. The entering students lack in the technical skill which can be used in their trades. The first step, therefore, is to give the elementary exercises needed in their departments. This is followed by more difficult and more ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one's thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of 'self-expression,' individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... may glance back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned, and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard more of it in our ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... too, came to his art with a magnanimous hope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of healing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds of fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear of self-revelation, Mahler found the solution of his conflict in this particular ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... whether Carlyle had any purpose, beyond that of self-expression, in thus utilising his own experiences for the human setting of his philosophy. It seems evident that he had. As he conceived them, these experiences possessed far more than a merely personal interest and meaning. He wrote of himself because he saw in ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... best basis of determining the right to literary recognition of men and women who have written and printed more or less without actually professing letters, will be the interest of the matter they have left to the kind of reader who does not care a pin about their real life-work, or about their self-expression as it really comes down ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... garrulous as he had once been silent. There was no subject in the Course of Study to which he could not correlate the wonders of his journey, and Teacher asked herself daily and in vain whether it were more pedagogically correct to encourage "spontaneous self-expression" or to insist upon "logically ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... what it was that made him write originally. Perhaps it was his name—Delancey Woburn sounds like the author—or the hero—of a serial. Or it may have been that his exuberant desire for self-expression had burst through the four walls of practical professions. He had, I believe, considered the stage and the church. Journalism would have seemed to me the obvious outlet but he preferred literature. "Creation is such fun," he would explain, beaming. And, of course, he was tremendously ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco |
