Individual Expression Quotes

Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action. ~ Greg Thomas

The personality and style of a photographer usually limits the type of subject with which he deals best. For example Cartier-Bresson is very interested in people and in travel; these things plus his precise feeling for geometrical relationships determine the type of pictures he takes best. What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. ~ Alexey Brodovitch

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another's individuality. ~ Susan Forward

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'. ~ Ezra Pound

Facilitative attitudes (and skills) can help a therapist gain entry into the group Freedom from a desire to control the outcome, and respect for the capacity of the group, and skills in releasing individual expression Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem Acceptance of the problems experienced by the group where they are clearly defined as issues Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future ~ Carl Rogers

If we want the freedom to take part in our bit of differentness, then we must allow others their rights to take part in theirs, as long as they do not harm the person or property of a non-consenting other, of course. IT'S JUST common sense. It's also constitutional and it forms the cornerstone of the American ideal: free individual expression, tolerance and compassion. ~ Peter McWilliams

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming

Individuals have the right to pick and choose which expressions to condemn, which to praise and which to say nothing about. Governments, however, must remain neutral as to the content of expression. And governments must protect the rights of all to express even the most despicable of views. ~ Alan Dershowitz

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something
related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot
separate technique from expression. There is only expression. ~ Kimon Nicolaides

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time.
Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished.

The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redef ~ Ronald Carter

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.

If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ~ Jaron Lanier

Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all. So, I'm not really a fan of Free music. Having said that, Jazz is based on individual expression and I'm compelled to respect the Free player's option to express himself as he chooses. ~ Pete La Roca

[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do. ~ Christine Kenneally

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. ~ Henry Jenkins

That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed. ~ Josiah Royce

From 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for 'perfection.' ~ Naomi Wolf

Surfing is an individual expression of one's own worth and one's own ability to participate directly with nature. And what makes it really enjoyable to me is that every wave is different ... there's a special, non-repetitive pleasure in it that never gets boring. ~ Otis Chandler

how to achieve a reasonable synthesis between the forces that drive a person to seek individual expression and those that drive him to comply with the wishes of others. ~ Kevin Ashton

Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all ~ Nikita Khrushchev

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There are two kinds of patriotism
monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:
the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism. ~ Mark Twain

Your words and wishes are cheap if they do not find expression in your actual gifts. ~ A.B. Simpson

It is certainly possible that an individual can, qua individual, suffer some failure of meaning, as in pathological boredom or depression. But any given social world is also a nexus of common significances, saliences, taboos, and a general shared orientation that can also either be sustained or can fail. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of such a social condition, shared meaningfulness, or intelligibility, is that it can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure. (His general name for the achievement and maintenance of such a form of intelligible life is "Sittlichkeit" and his case for this sort of priority of Sittlichkeit over strictly individualist accounts of mindedness in-action has not, I want to argue, been properly appreciated.) ~ Robert B. Pippin

the senile, lecherous expression of a camel. ~ Yann Martel

We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died - in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

She was rather handsome than beautiful. Her face was captivating by reason of a certain frankness of expression and a contradictory subtle play of features. ~ Kate Chopin

How could a state be governed, or protected in its foreign relations if every individual remained free to obey or not to obey the law according to his private opinion. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Kurt Vonnegut wasn't a chatty guy, but when he spoke, it was always clear and very funny, in the way that he wrote, in a very specific kind of combination of word groupings and expressions that lived somewhere else. ~ Susan Sarandon

What is truth?" Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. ~ Timothy Snyder

I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration. ~ Masiela Lusha

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport. ~ Douglas Adams

There are moments in each of our lives when something greater - something Incontrovertible - steps in to help us realign with our truest lives and most authentic selves. This perceived crisis or trauma either shakes our world to its core or tears everything apart so that we are launched once again in the direction of our best lives, the most authentic expression of who we are each here to be. ~ Panache Desai

I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. ~ John F. Kennedy

Formation of a new race takes place when, over several generations, individuals in one group reproduce more frequently among themselves than they do with individuals in other groups. ~ J. Philippe Rushton

Jonathan Edwards, the dear old soul, who, if his doctrine is true, is now in heaven rubbing his holy hands with glee, as he hears the cries of the damned, preached this doctrine; and he said: 'Can the believing husband in heaven be happy with his unbelieving wife in hell? Can the believing father in heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in hell? Can the loving wife in heaven be happy with her unbelieving husband in hell?' And he replies: 'I tell you, yea. Such will be their sense of justice, that it will increase rather than diminish their bliss.' There is no wild beast in the jungles of Africa whose reputation would not be tarnished by the expression of such a doctrine.
These doctrines have been taught in the name of religion, in the name of universal forgiveness, in the name of infinite love and charity. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

But the individual was not a tool for something. He was the maker of tools. He was the one who must build. Even for the best purpose it is criminal to turn an individual into simply a means for some ultimate end. A society in which the dignity of the individual is destroyed cannot hope to be a decent society. ~ Golda Meir

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

A patient complains of feeling nervous or fearful. These feelings and behaviors suggest that the patient has an anxiety disorder, and the doctor prescribes whatever drug will most probably work for an anxiety disorder. However, there's no conclusive way to tell that this patient definitely has an anxiety disorder. Even if the doctor did get the diagnosis correct, there's a great deal of variation regarding which drug class (for example, anti-anxiety drugs versus antidepressants) a particular individual will respond to and which drug within a class (for example, Prozac versus Zoloft) will work best. If the drug doesn't work, the doctor will try the next one on the list and so on, thus delaying treatment success and complicating the process with the mix-and-match type of treatment. ~ Chris Prentiss

Abuse is the weakest expression of strength. It is weakness to destroy what you ought to protect, build and make better. ~ Kingsley Opuwari Manuel

A soulmate is an ongoing connection with another individual that the soul picks up again in various times and places over lifetimes. We are attracted to another person at a soul level not because that person is our unique complement, but because by being with that individual, we are somehow provided with an impetus to become whole ourselves. ~ Edgar Cayce

To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren't so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. ~ Dayna Tortorici

I think we are afraid of each other when it comes to sex, because we read so much about sex, we talk so openly about sex, we see movies and we read books; but when we are face to face with someone else, we forget our individual patterns; that we are unique. So we try to repeat other people's patterns, according to what we seen and what we heard. So most of us are very frustrated, because we don't accept our individuality as far as sex is concerned. ~ Paulo Coelho

He became the largest individual hog farmer in the North. And, in order not to be victimized by meat packers, he bought controlling interest in an Indianapolis slaughterhouse. In order not to be victimized by steel suppliers, he bought controlling interest in a steel company in Pittsburgh. In order not to be victimized by coal suppliers, he bought controlling interest in several mines. In order not to be victimized by money lenders, he founded a bank. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. ~ Oscar Wilde

Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353] ~ Kim Edwards

I have met thousands and thousands of pro-choice men and women. I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force". ~ John B. S. Haldane

The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns. ~ Carol Shields

Approaches to death and dying reveal much of the attitude of society as a whole to the individuals who compose it. The development of ideas of what constitutes a good death can even be traced to prehistory. ~ Cicely Saunders

There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk. ~ Charles Dickens

History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, a decline in collective enthusiasm is reflected by a resulting quantitative decrease of the contribution of each individual, each of the elements forming the whole of the masses. Work is so paralysed that insignificant quantities are produced. It is time to make a correction. ~ Che Guevara

The basic error of fundamentalism is that it overlooks the contribution of the receptive side in the revelatory situation and consequently identifies one individual and conditioned form of receiving the divine with the divine itself. ~ Paul Tillich

The way everyone looked at me made me uncomfortable. Even Edward. It was like I had grown a hundred feet during the course of the morning. I tried to ignore the impressed looks, mostly keeping my eyes on Nessie's sleeping face and Jacob's unchanged expression. I would always be just Bella to him, and that was a relief. Bella Cullen, Breaking Dawn, Chapter 39, p.747 ~ Stephenie Meyer

At its most basic, the spiritual is the experience of the connectedness that underlies reality. The depth of that experience depends on the capacity of the individual to set aside considerations of self, thereby gaining access to connection. ~ Arthur J. Deikman

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us. ~ Ansel Adams

Compassion is the ultimate expression of your highest self ~ Russell Simmons

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before - indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities. ~ Marcel Proust

Memoirs of the North Africa campaign attest that, fierce and brutal as much of the fighting was, relations between individual enemies retained a quality of forbearance that seems, today, almost impossible to imagine. This ~ Steven Pressfield

Emotions become more violent when expression is stifled. ~ Philo

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions. ~ Paul Klee

The singing I like best is when I sing. ~ Marty Rubin

Even if you're just shouting into a void, self-expression is a healing thing. ~ Marty Rubin

Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow - after you have done your best to achieve success today ~ Maxwell Maltz

He's fast asleep, curled up at the other end of my bed, looking peaceful. The expression on his face says he's not really sad, and he's not overcompensating for his sadness by acting all crazy or silly, he's just ... content. And that makes me glad, because more than anything else, I want him to be happy. ~ Miranda Kenneally