The readinesse of doing doth express
No other but the doer's willingnesse. [ Herrick ]
No woman dares express all she thinks. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
That air and harmony of shape express,
Fine by degrees, and beautifully less. [ Prior ]
Women's glances express what they dare not speak. [ Alphonse Karr ]
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. [ Montaigne ]
Silence has been given to woman to better express her thoughts. [ Desnoyers ]
That is the best part of beauty which a picture cannot express. [ Bacon ]
Lively feeling of situations, and power to express them, make the poet. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The woman we love most is often the one to whom we express it the least. [ Beauchene ]
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them. [ Oliver Goldsmith ]
Women have the same desires as men, but do not have the same right to express them. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
To speak, but say nothing, is for three people out of four to express all they think. [ O. Commettant ]
It is safe to make a choice of your thoughts, scarcely ever safe to express them all. [ Barrow ]
In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed. [ Goethe ]
Glances in a young woman are charming interpreters, which express what the lips would not dare to speak.
For none can express thee, though all should approve thee. I love thee so, dear, that I only can love thee. [ E. B. Browning ]
To express the most difficult matters clearly, and everything intelligibly, is to strike coins out of pure gold. [ Geibel ]
Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely. [ Bulwer ]
Thought is the first faculty of man: to express it is one of his first desires; to spread it, his dearest privilege. [ Raynal ]
I have tried merely to express what I had to say with as much simplicity and as little affectation as I could command. [ James A. Froude, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]
Great poets try to describe what all men see and to express what all men feel; if they cannot describe it, they let it alone. [ John Ruskin ]
In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul. [ Emerson ]
In oratory, affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn. [ Lord Herbert ]
Who is there that in logical words can express the affect that music has upon us? A kind of unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that. [ T. Carlyle ]
The main thing in writing is to have distinct, and clear, and well-marshalled ideas, and then to express them simply and without affectation. This forms what we may call the bones of a good style. [ John Stuart Blackie, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Praise or Applause? We express our approbation by praise and applause. Praise is the general, applause, the specific term. Applause springs from impulse, while praise is the result of reason and reflection. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page without noticing the medium. [ Coleridge ]
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Let us pity the wicked man; for it is very sad to seek happiness where it does not exist. Let our compassion express itself in efforts to bring him gently back to sacred principle, and if he persist, let us pity him the more for a blindness so fatal to himself. [ De Charnage ]
The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions. [ Burke ]
No language can express the power and beauty, and heroism and majesty of a mother's love; it shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven. [ E. H. Chapin ]
Other parts of the body assist the speaker, but these speak themselves. By them we ask, we promise, we invoke, we dismiss, we threaten, we entreat, we deprecate; we express fear, joy, grief, our doubts, our assent, our penitence; we show moderation, profusion; we mark number and time. [ Quintilian ]
Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it. [ Hazlitt ]
If I were to choose the people with whom I would spend my hours of conversation, they should be certainly such as labored no further than to make themselves readily and clearly apprehended, and would have patience and curiosity to understand me. To have good sense and ability to express it are the most essential and necessary qualities in companions. When thoughts rise in us fit to utter among familiar friends, there needs but very little care in clothing them. [ Steele ]
I have very often lamented and hinted my sorrow, in several speculations, that the art of painting is made so little use of to the improvement of manners. When we consider that it places the action of the person represented in the most agreeable aspect imaginable, - that it does not only express the passion or concern as it sits upon him who is drawn, but has under those features the height of the painter's imagination, - what strong images of virtue and humanity might we not expect would be instilled into the mind from the labors of the pencil! [ Steele ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]
My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]