"Self-expression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a slave-driver. And the odd part of it all is that I'm wringing a perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excitement and the novelty of the thing. I'm being something more than a mere mollusk. I'm making my power felt, and producing results. And self-expression, I find, is the breath of life to my soul. But I've scarcely time to do my hair, and my complexion is gone, and I've got cracks in my cheek-skin. I'm getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever again love me. Even my own babies ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... connection with the annual play festival which he had established several years before. This proved to be a huge success and gave the boys and girls from the district schools new confidence in their ability of self-expression. One of the greatest needs which farmers' organizations are to-day feeling is their lack of leaders who can speak for them effectively at public gatherings and before legislative hearings in competition ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... the tenor of Agatha's last letter, of the last self-expression of that effigy upstairs who (you could see) knew ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... by the river!" That could not grow, even if it had wanted to! For it was quite in vain that the world cried out to him to settle down and become as other men; he could not. The thing that was tearing at his vitals would continue to tear; the only choice he had was between self-expression and madness. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... social, collective element in art is too apt to be forgotten. When an artist claims that expression is the aim of art he is too apt to mean self-expression only—utterance of individual emotion. Utterance of individual emotion is very closely neighboured by, is almost identical with, self-enhancement. What should be a generous, and in part altruistic, ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... of his friend's abstemiousness, and was disturbed by a great longing to remove the hidden cause. But intimate speech played a minor part in the friendship of these two men. The very depth and strength of their feeling for each other constrained them to a particular reticence in the matter of self-expression. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... anxious to give a good time To their children, if only they helped them to climb, Unconsciously aiding the new Self-Expression Left all from the start to their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... 'Pauline' as the history of a poetic soul; with both the earlier poems, as the manifestation of the self-conscious spiritual ambitions which were involved in that history. This first imaginative mood was also outgrowing itself in the very act of self-expression; for the tragedies written before the conclusion of 'Sordello' impress us as the product of a different mental state—as the work of a more balanced imagination ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... But at all events, it's a rather flat business, all this rushing about to dinners and dances; it'll last a few years perhaps—then what? I tell you what, my dear, there's only one good thing in this world, and that's work—self-expression. It hurts my pride every time I see a nice girl growing older year after year, idle, expensive, waiting for some man to miraculously happen along and take her out of it. I tell you the interesting lives are those of people who've had to work up from the bottom. A working girl may have ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... faculties of his nature. The social man always has friends whom he loves; work which he feels to be worth doing; interests which occupy his highest powers; causes which appeal to his deepest sympathies. Such a life of rounded activity, of arduous endeavor, of full, free self-expression is in itself the highest possible reward. It is the only form of satisfaction worthy of man. It is in the deepest sense of the word success. For ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... centralizing of political power in the hands of Louis XIV. of France and his successors had been accompanied by a "standardizing" of human affairs which favored practical efficiency and the easier running of the social machine, but which was far from helpful to the self-expression of distinctly-marked individuals. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... employees as gentlemen and sports—men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... persons who are degraded by the consuming; it is destroying permanently the raw-material source which, science has painfully explained, could be made inexhaustible. Some intellectual revolution must come which will de-emphasize business and industry and re-emphasize most other ways of self-expression. ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... however, and that is that Galds, with regard to social questions, was neither a radical nor an original thinker. When one considers the sort of ideas which had been bandied about Europe under the impulse of Ibsen, Tolstoy and others,—the Nietzschean doctrine of self-expression at any cost, the right of woman to live her own life regardless of convention, the new theories of governmental organization or lack of organization—one cannot regard Galds as other than a social conservative, who could be considered a radical nowhere outside of Spain. In how many plays ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... War. The provincial Press had been much impressed by their vivid picture of slum realities. Anonyma's poor were always yearning, yearning to be understood and loved by a ministering upper class, yearning for light, for art, for self-expression, for novels by high-souled ladies. The atmosphere of Anonyma's fiction was thick ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... beyond what are the common need of human nature; he was certainly good enough for her. Their marriage was all right. It was only the foolish devil of egotism in her which goaded to unwholesome activity the other side of her nature, that need for self-expression which marriage didn't satisfy. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... moment that this was a case of paralysis agitans, or St. Vitus' Dance. There was nothing involuntary in her unrest. It was all part of an intense vitality and an intense desire for self-expression. When she was in one of her worst tempers, she would pace up and down a room, turning at each wall like a lion in a cage, in a way which I have only seen one other person effect with equal spirit and unconsciousness. That was an eminent statesman, in the moment of great political ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... not heard: "They are valued for their fidelity to other men's standards, never for the worth of their own lives. They are hired to give always the opinions of others, and they are denied the only thing that can make any life of worth—freedom of self-expression. The surest road to failure for them is to hold or express opinions of their own. They are held, not as necessities, but as a luxury, like heaven itself, for which if men have the means to spare, they pay. They can have no real fellowship with the servants ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... 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
... existence forms a part. You are to push back the self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included in the widening circles of its intuitive love: till you find in every manifestation of life—even those which you have petulantly classified as cruel or obscene—the ardent self-expression of that Immanent Being whose spark burns deep in your ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... only to win love or to bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these—some external shaping of clay—had unfitted her for the purpose for which she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but her nature ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... revival of Belgian Arts and Letters which followed shortly after the 1830 Revolution is one of the most striking examples of the influence exercised by political events on intellectual activity. For over a century the nation had been devoid of self-expression, and during the fifteen years of Union with Holland scarcely any notable works were produced. No doubt this time, being one of economic recovery, was not favourable to the efflorescence of Art and Letters, but the intense activity of the period of independence ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... according to the needs 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
... failures due to bombast, caricature, and unmitigated horror. In all these the effort to be expressive has transgressed the conditions of pleasing effect. For the creative and imitative impulse is indiscriminate. It does not consider the eventual beauty of the effect, but only the blind instinct of self-expression. Hence an untrained and not naturally sensitive mind cannot distinguish or produce anything good. This critical incapacity has always been a cause of failure and a just ground for ridicule; but it remained for some thinkers of our time ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... sovereign, Miss Bailey, who found him now as 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
... the noblest inhabitant of the planet, and by the further critical observation of nature he proposes to interpret and guide his life. He is convinced that this combined authority of reason and observation will lead to the summum bonum of the golden mean in which unbridled self-expression will be seen as equally unwise and indecent and ascetic repression as both unworthy and unnecessary. It is important to again remind ourselves that confidence in the human spirit as the master of its own fate, and in reason and natural observation as offering it the means of this self-control ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... marvellous facility in writing seems really to have been accompanied with no corresponding readiness of speech and reply. Probably it was only, as she herself states, when she had a pen in her hand that her lethargic ideas would arise and flow in order as they should. And the need of self-expression felt by all those who have not the gift of communicating themselves fully and easily in speech or manner, a strong need in her case, from her having so much to express, was the spur that drove her to seek and find the mode ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single masculine figure ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... very much, nor she to them. But all the time they were playing up to her, trying to draw her attention to themselves and make her laugh with them. She did laugh. It did not seem to matter to her at all that they were often crude and blatant and sometimes common in their self-expression. She laughed from her heart. But her laughter was a little different. It sat by itself, an elfish thing, with a touch of seriousness about it, its arms hugging its knees, and looked beyond them all and saw how much bigger and finer the joke was than they thought it. She was the spirit ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... taboos, generated in the first instance chiefly by superstitious fears, but gradually with the growth of reason and observation becoming simplified and rationalized into forms of use. On the one side there has been the positive impulse—of mere animal Desire and the animal urge of self-expression; on the other there has been the negative force of Fear based on ignorance—the latter continually carving, moulding and shaping the former. According to this an organized study and classification of taboos might yield some interesting results; ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... their powers of reasoning, store their minds, and enlarge their horizons—but that they might pass some infernal examination or other, ad majorem Smelliae gloriam; they were not to practise the musical art that they might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace, delight, and self-expression—but that they might "play their piece" to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride, expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other reason than that it was the recommended way to Eternal Bliss and a Good Time Hereafter—the whole ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required fresh channels for its self-expression. It was destined to find these, not as of old in sculpture, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... style of your own, unhampered in its originality by the memory of the achievements of others resulting from much reading. There are still others who advise an equal division of time between study of the classics and self-expression. The latter is the most natural and common method and leads in time to the goal. Perhaps the same is true of musical style. Technical skill, accuracy, interpretation and appreciation come from ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... course no more important than originality in creation. See how the composers who have been the most original have been the ones who have laid the surest foundation for permanent fame. Here again true originality has been merely the highest form of self-expression. Non e vero? When the composer has sought originality and contrived to get it by purposely taking out-of-the-way methods, what has he produced? Nothing but a horrible sham—a structure of cards which is destroyed by the next wind ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... his substance from another finite being—but there are times, when he feels that his self-expression needs some liberation from at least a part of his own soul. At such times, shall he not better turn to those greater souls, rather than to the external, the immediate, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... vividly, though they take them with great valour. They are more sensitive to the sights and sounds of the fighting lines than the average English "Tommy," who has a tougher temperament and does not allow his mind to brood over blood and agony. They have the gift, also, of self-analysis and self-expression, so that they are able to translate their emotions into vivid words, whereas our own men are taciturn for the most part about their side of the business and talk objectively, looking outwards, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... to live in Washington, some social position there, and a title envied in Marion, Reno, Butte, or Salt Lake City. Senators who start young serve long and obediently, suppressing all their natural instincts for self-expression, and attain if they are lucky the scant distinction of a committee chairmanship in a legislature that has steadily tended toward submergence. To the House? Individuals are lost in the House. And the Presidency comes to ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... the provinces who read his lieder and wrote to him, like old Schulz, and felt themselves one with him. There were poor artists,—a composer among others,—who had not, and could not attain, not only success, but self-expression, and it made them glad to have their ideas realized by Christophe. And dearest of all, perhaps,—there were those who wrote to him without giving their names, and, being thus more free to speak, naively laid bare their touching confidence in the ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... of his writings, prose and verse, is his extraordinary subjectivity, pushing the poet's ego into the foreground. With light, graceful touch, he demonstrates the possibility of unrestrained self-expression in an artistic guise. The boldness and energy with which "he gave voice to his hidden self" were so novel, so surprising, that his melodies at once awoke an echo. This subjectivity is his Jewish birthright. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... himself again. We all have our particular mode of self-expression in moments of elation. Fillmore's took the shape of buying a new waistcoat and a hundred half-dollar cigars and being very fussy about what he had for lunch. It may have been an optical illusion, but he appeared to Sally to put on at least ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... master-biologist, one of the 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 desire to seek out ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... 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 some ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... or even tenure of employment in a business. Is the right to petition for a redress of grievances an adequate industrial expression of the Christian doctrine of the worth and sacredness of personality? Is not property essential to the real freedom and self-expression of a human personality? ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Theign, flushed with the felicity of self-expression, made little of that. "But he goes too far, you see, and it clears the air—pouah! Now therefore"—and he glanced at the ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... people it makes a regular battlefield of the human heart—this struggle for self-expression," said Philip. "You are going to do beautiful work in the world, and do it well. When I realize that your violin belonged to your father, that he played it before you were born, and it no doubt affected your mother strongly, and then couple with that the years you have roamed these fields ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... pertained to his maturer years. The pictures on the walls—the few shabby books that had drifted into his lonely and misunderstood childhood—remained. There was the locked box containing, Conning knew full well, the pitiful but sacred attempts at self-expression. The key was gone, but he recollected every scrap of paper which lay hidden in the old, dented tin box. Presently he went to the dormer window and opened it wide. Leaning out he tried to find his way back to Pine ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... passages. Among the documents read at the trial of Innocent Smith, for example, is a statement made by a Trans-Siberian station-master, which is a perfectly exquisite burlesque at the expense of the Russian intelligenzia. The whole series of documents, in fact, are delightful bits of self-expression on the part of a very varied team of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out such things we must be content to take the page, and not the story, as his unit of work. Manalive, by the way, is the first of the author's stories in which women are represented as talking to one another. Chesterton ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... delightful. Her quick responses to Sardou's questions were amazing in their logic. The extreme purity of this young soul seeking self-expression so courageously, struck the two men with ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... impossible it was for him a sad but not a hopeless world. Indeed he rejoiced in his sadness. Annabel was four years older than he. If he could make her to know the depth of his passion perhaps she would wait for him. He sought for self-expression in The Household Book of Poetry—a sorrowful and pious volume. He could find no ladder of rhyme with an adequate reach. He endeavored to build one. He wrote melancholy verses and letters, confessing his passion, to Annabel, which she did not encourage but which she ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... duly relieved of his truly honest effort at self-expression, he went back again to his own kind—to the prattling, the well-groomed, the ultra-fashionables of both mind and body. And there on the shining tennis-courts and the soft golf greens, through the late yellow afternoon and the first gray threat of twilight, the old sickening ennui came ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... such aims at self-expression for its own sake. It is a necessity of his nature, an outpouring of pent-up feeling, as much as is the song of the lark. Of course we are speaking of the true creative artist, and not of the laborious ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... all the world. They assert that gods in Paradise envy human beings. Why? Because God's will, in giving his love, finds its completeness in man's will returning that love. Therefore Humanity is a necessary factor in the perfecting of the divine truth. The Infinite, for its self-expression, comes down into the manifoldness of the Finite; and the Finite, for its self-realisation, must rise into the unity of the Infinite. Then only is the Cycle of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... teach a different conception of historical events. To define them as an ever-recurring struggle for Freedom against every form of Might. A struggle resultant from an innate yearning for self-expression, and the recognition of one's own possibilities and their attitude toward other human beings. History to us means a compilation of experiences, out of which the individual, as well as the race, will ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... a new career. The children were seven and nine—very nearly eight and ten. Marcia said she wanted a chance at self-expression. She announced a course in landscape gardening—"landscape architecture" was the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... reasons and for motives not of State, They arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; But sometimes, in a smoking-room, one learns why things ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... have a vital interest in the size of the families of those better situated in life. Large families among the rich are immoral not only because they invade the natural right of woman to the control of her own body, to self-development and to self-expression, but because they are oppressive to the poorer elements of society. If the upper and middle classes of society had kept pace with the poorer elements of society in reproduction during the past fifty ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... beneficial enterprise in the community work is the amateur theater. It gives the richest opportunity for self-expression. It includes acting, literature, singing, music, and painting. It amuses and teaches—it reflects and analyzes the social life and directs it in its entirety toward higher levels of achievements. Whatever the shortcomings and the sins of the Russian Bolsheviks, in one thing they have struck, ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... water-colors, created them in wood, and paint, and drapery. I had escaped the stultifying effects of parasitism, rescued body and brain from sluggishness and inactivity, successfully shaken off the shackles of society. Freedom of act and speech was mine; independence, self-expression—yes, all that, but where—where ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... laughed at. Not that the Englishman lacks heart; he is not cold, as is generally supposed—on the contrary he is warm-hearted and feels very strongly; but just as peasants, for lack of words to express their feelings, become stolid, so it is with the Englishman from sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. Nor is the Englishman deliberately hypocritical; but his tenacity, combined with his powerlessness to express his feelings, often gives him the appearance of a hypocrite. He is inarticulate, has not the clear and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and temperament. The result is of great and varied interest. The social history of America is being written piecemeal, and written often with a skill and sincerity which merit the highest praise. And not merely has each province found its chronicler, but the immigrants, also, are intent upon self-expression. The little masterpieces of Abraham Cahan are an earnest of what the Ghetto can achieve, and whether the Jews are faithful to Yiddish, or, like Cahan, acquire the language of their adopted country, there is no reason why they ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... mass of conflicting qualities blended, unified and held in subjection by sheer strength of will, fortified by a professional discipline, deliberately embraced and rigorously followed. Add to this that he had in a supreme degree the creative impulse, an irrepressible instinct for self-expression. It is not strange that the self-expression of a personality so fine, so complex, so rich, so rare, should produce the series of compositions which entitle Luis de Leon to rank among the very greatest of Spanish poets, and beside the most glorious figures in the history ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... conventions into rules of conduct which are of actual service to their children in their daily lives of factory work and of city amusements. Those mothers, through their sympathy and adaptability, substitute keen present interests and activity for solemn warnings and restraint, self-expression for repression. Their vigorous family life allies itself by a dozen bonds to the educational, the industrial and the recreational organizations of the modern city, and makes for intelligent understanding, industrial efficiency and sane ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... metaphysical assumptions of this paper. With that conceded, we may go on to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being may be presented in a comprehensible manner. Essentially this presentation must involve an element of self-expression must partake quite as much of the nature of art as of science. One finds in the first conference of the Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking, indeed a very different philosophical dialect from mine, but coming to the same practical conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newland counting ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... side to a childhood more beautiful than the original. Many a man and woman possesses this disciplined childhood through life. Goodness seems the very atmosphere they breathe, and everything they do to be exactly fitting. Their acts are performed with full self-expression, yet without strut or intrusion of consciousness. Whatever comes from them is happily blended and organized into the entirety of life. Such should be our aim. We should seek to be born again, and not to remain where ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... extraordinary how this effort at self-expression excited Joan. She was rarely self-conscious, but she was usually passive or stolid; now there was a brilliant flush in her face and her large eyes deepened and glowed. "I heerd tell of you, Mr. Holliwell. Fellers come up here to see ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... is 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 from ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... of course, lay the natural restlessness and passions of men, the impatience of control, the longing for liberty, and the craving for self-expression. The combative instinct, pride, obstinacy, and notably the sex-instinct, were from earliest times spurring men on to a disregard of the conventional and the ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and slow wooing, like the movement of a minuet; each postured to each, not from any insincerity, except perhaps a little now and then on Ralph's side, but because for both it was a natural mode of self-expression. It was an age of dignity abruptly broken here and there by violence. There were slow and gorgeous pageants followed by brutal and bestial scenes, like the life of a peacock who paces composedly in the sun and then scuttles ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... distilled from the liver of the cod, and the wisdom of Solomon, came in for an equal share of attention. How the good old gentleman must have enjoyed writing those letters! And, though I have never written my own son three letters in my life, I suppose the desire of self-expression is stirring in me now these seventy-eight years later. I wonder what he would have said could he read these confessions of mine—he who married my grandmother on a capital of twenty-five dollars and enough bleached cotton to make half a dozen shirts! My ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completing of a process. Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the cradle to the grave for self-expression and everything that pushes us in a direction opposed to our natural tendencies is done half-heartedly, inefficiently and disgruntledly. These are the steps that lead straight to failure. Yet failure can be avoided and success approximated by every normal person if he will take the same ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... else.... We should drop all this talking and writing. All this confused, uneducated mass of self-expression. Self-expression, with no self worth expressing. That's just what we shouldn't do with our selves—express them. We should train them, educate them, teach them to think, see that they know something—know it exactly, with no blurred edges, no ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... Renaissance Morals" can lie in its corner and rot, whilst I shall concern myself with a far more vital theme—The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. The rough entries in my diary have been a habit of many futile years; but they have never sufficed for self-expression. I have not needed it till now. But now, with Judith and Carlotta gone from me, my one friend, Pasquale, cut for ever from my life, even the sympathetic Polyphemus driven into eternity by my murderous hand, I feel the irresistible craving to express myself fully and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... house; and after that, presumably, a country estate." Later he would say about his years in Elyria, "I was a good deal of a Babbitt, but never completely one." Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers—a need for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind of experience?—that would become a recurrent motif ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... He assumes a natural capacity in man for apprehending the truth, and appeals to the mind rather than to the emotions. The Gospel is styled by him 'the word of truth,' and he bids men 'prove all things.' Worship is not a meaningless ebullition of feeling or a superstitious ritual, but a form of self-expression which is to be enlightened and guided by thought. 'I will pray with the understanding and sing with ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... you have done this with a swagger and have called your servitor "old top" or other playful name. Mark your mistake! You were in the presence, if you but knew it, of a real author, not a tyro fumbling for self-expression, but a man with thirty serials to his credit. Shall I name the periodical? It was the Golden Hours, I think. Ginger-beer and jangling bells were but a fringe upon his darker purpose. His desk was somewhere ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... solitude—not fruitless, but filled with memories and ideas. It is only then that she finds out herself, comes to her true self, grows strong.... In the letters of her friend far away she finds a support for herself; in her own, she, very likely for the first time, finds full self-expression.... But as two people who start from a stream's source, along opposite banks, at first can touch hands, then only communicate by voice, and finally lose sight of each other altogether; so two natures grow apart at last by separation. ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of my friend. I was furiously jealous, and the young man's mother was opposed to me, but I still think of that early friendship with tenderness. I know that my boy friend was the first who made me capable of self-expression, the first who taught me how to make friends at all. And if he still cared for me, I know that his love would ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 youth, might have saved many of us from chronic entanglements; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of its life. But the perceptive faculties in their turn grow by expressing themselves; and unless they are allowed to express themselves—unless the child is allowed to express himself (for expression, if it is genuine, is always self-expression)—their growth will be arrested, and the mission which all educationalists assign to education will not ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... words, tones that he makes, the artist determines in us a process of expression similar to his. Out of our own minds we put into the sense-symbols he has woven ideas and feelings which provide the content and meaning he intends. Hence all aesthetic appreciation is self-expression. This is evident in the case of the more lyrical types of art. The lyric poem is appreciated by us as an expression of our own inner life; music as an expression of our own slumberous or subconscious moods. Yet even the more objective types ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... nature of the invitation given to them. This Responsiveness is inherent in Spirit; otherwise Spirit would have no means of expansion into manifestation. Responsiveness is the principle of Spirit's Self-expression. We do not have to create responsive action on the part of electricity. We can safely take this Responsiveness for granted as pure natural law. Our desire first works on the Arupa level and thence concentrates ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... societies, organized for almost every conceivable purpose, lay and academic, have always played an important role in undergraduate affairs and have formed the most characteristic avenue for self-expression outside the class room. Many, if not most, of these organizations have had only a brief existence. Others, in one form or another, have continued through long periods, and have often exercised a strong, though not always an obvious, influence in the whole fabric of university life. ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... the sake of society may rightly proceed to any point short of reversing or aborting the process of differentiation within himself. Every individual is an end in himself; there are no other ends for society; and that society is the best which best provides for the most complete development and self-expression of the individuals ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... first of his plays in blank verse. Hitherto he had written with his eye on the stage, and in the savage spirit of the Storm and Stress. Now, however, the higher ambition of the dramatic poet began to assert itself. His views of life were changing, and his nature craved a freer and nobler self-expression than was possible in the "three hours' traffic of the stage." He had begun Don Carlos at Bauerbach, intending to make it a love-tragedy in a royal household and incidentally to scourge the Spanish inquisition. Little by little, however, the centre of his interest shifted ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... craving. In his own words, he had loved Antigone before he visited this earth: and no one woman could probably have made him happy, because he was for ever demanding more from love than it can give in the mixed circumstances of mortal life. Moreover, it must be remembered that his power of self-expression has bestowed permanent form on feelings which may have been but transitory; nor can we avoid the conclusion that, sincere as Shelley was, he, like all poets, made use of the emotion of the moment for purposes of art, converting ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... leader he will either be able, himself, to arrange a musical entertainment, or he will secure some one who can and will do so. All, it is contended, can learn to sing if they begin early enough; and there is probably no better mode of self-expression and no better way of waking up people emotionally and socially than to engage them in singing. The importance of singing, to secure good and right emotional attitudes toward life and mankind, is indicated in the saying, "Let me make the songs of a nation ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... am a soul, and I am not a body. But "I have a body": that is, my personality is embodied or incarnate: I have a body which serves as the vehicle or instrument of my life as a man here upon earth: a body which is the organ of my spirit's self-expression and the medium both of my life's experience and of my intercourse with other men. I think, and my thoughts are mediated by movements of the brain. I speak, and the movements of my vocal chords set up vibrations ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the theatre. It renewed in English life the robust vitality of humour which had been repressed under the Commonwealth—though, in spite of repression, there were, even among the Puritan divines, men like the author of Joanereidos, whose self-expression ran the whole gamut from freedom ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me! Many times, in my relations with Seriosha, this wish to resemble grown-up people put a rude ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... with it only two qualities of value: the character it creates in the making; the self-expression of the individuality in the use of it, when once it has been made. The art of making money implies all those qualities—resolution, concentration, economy, self-control—which make for success and happiness. The power of using it makes a man who has become the captain of his own soul in the process ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... 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
... conceptions of state are easily found. Consider, for example, the views of Russell. Through every page of his book there shines the determined belief in the inalienable rights of the individual. Self-expression of the individual through creative activity is the basic value, or at least the fundamental means of realizing values. Russell sees nothing sacred or final in any form of existing government. He would like to see government expanded in some directions and contracted ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... realize the human mind as that stage in the evolution of the cosmic order at which an individuality has arisen capable of expressing, not merely the livingness, but also the personalness of the universal underlying spirit, then we see that its most perfect mode of self-expression must be by identifying itself with these ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... material best suited to furnish the child with real problems. As little children have their thoughts and observations directed mainly toward people and centered about the home, the fairy tale rests secure as the intellectual counterpart to those thoughts. As self-expression and self-activity are the great natural instincts of the child, in giving opportunity to make a crown for a princess, mould a clay bowl, decorate a tree, play a game, paint the wood, cut paper animals, sing a lullaby, or trip a dance, the tale affords many problems exercising ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... princes and people, the people assert themselves, whenever they act, as a destructive force directed against the organization, but the masses, when they become organically related to the State, obtain their interests in a lawful and orderly way. When this organic relation is lacking, the self-expression of the masses is always violent; in despotic States the despot shows, therefore, indulgence for his people, and his rage is always felt by those surrounding him. Moreover, the people of a despotic State pay light taxes, which in a constitutional ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of their souls are not vulgar, only their environment has caused their outward self-expression to seem so. Once you get below the pompous bourgeoisie in France, for instance, the more delightful you find the spirit, and I expect it is the same in England. It is the pretentious aspiring would-bes who are vulgar—and Germany ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... Toil, hardship, heroic endurance, plodding monotony, burdens grievous to be borne—these things cover the canvases of Millet. All of his deep sincerity, his abiding melancholy, his rugged nobility are there; for every man who works in freedom simply reproduces himself. That is what true work is—self-expression, self-revelation. The style of Millet is so strongly marked, so deeply etched, that no man dare imitate it. It is covered by a perpetual copyright, signed and sealed with the life's blood of the artist. Then comes Corot the joyous, Corot the careless, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... some domestic training for girls had been provided in most of the cities, before 1914. Manual training for boys, though, despite much propaganda work, had made but little headway up to that time. As in the case of the kindergarten, the initiative and self-expression aspects of the manual-training movement made no appeal to those responsible for the work of the people's schools, and, in consequence, the manual activities have in German lands been reserved largely for the continuation and vocational ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot, for instance, conceive ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of self-knowledge and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... their voices our ears are dinned by the shouting and we imagine it is a whole people speaking. We forget those who sit silent at home, not joining in the storm. The silent mass of the majority is overlooked because it finds so few opportunities for self-expression. Only such a visit as this of the Prince gives ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... personality. Back of the personality is the soul itself, forever seeking utterance through its mask of personality. All genuine impulse to sing is from the soul in its need for expression. Through expression comes growth in soul consciousness and desire for greater and greater self-expression. ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... lad, in a rare moment of self-expression, "you know the poetry says he cherished his sight and touch by temperance; that an idiot might see a straggling line and be content, but he had an eye that winced at false work, and loved the true. When it says his finger-tips were perfected ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... being agreeable. It will help you to self-expression as nothing else will; it will call out your success qualities; it will broaden your sympathies. It is difficult to conceive of any more delightful birthright than to be born with this personal charm, and yet it is comparatively easy to ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... past fuses with the present you awaken to a larger privilege of life than man now knows. You feel yourself encompassed by truth, vital and strong. This art, erstwhile so baffling, stands revealed as the struggle of a superhuman entity for self-expression. The tendency toward God has to begin anew with each round of the life-spiral - that ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams |
