Individual Expression Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

Henry Jenkins

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. When they looked in the mirror, the American and Chinese women had begun to see each other's reflection. To reach the World Cup final, the Americans had become tightly connected by the ligaments of teamwork, while the Chinese had realized the necessary freedom of individual expression.

Jere Longman

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Singing your own songs is all about individual expression.

Lyle Lovett

#11. This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation.

Hortense Odlum

#12. Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.

Bruce Lee

#13. For the trustees to turn away from the entirely reasonable request of the students that a hearing-impaired individual be made president of the college is a very unfortunate expression of insensitivity.

Barney Frank

#14. Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms.

Ayn Rand

#15. To restrict oneself and somewhat settle under a particular sexual essence is to limit our expression and individual progress.

Nityananda Das

#16. There's no wrong way of doing art. It's an expression of the individual.

Swizz Beatz

#17. Communist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about ... In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.

Margaret Thatcher

#18. Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73

Gilles Deleuze

#19. Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art ... because of the importance it places on the individual, their liberty, self-expression, creativity, and personal responsibility.

Oscar Wilde

#20. An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

Mark Tobey

#21. The more restricted a method, the lesser the opportunity for one's individual freedom of expression.

Bruce Lee

#22. A virtue of the free enterprise system is that it offers every individual the greatest opportunity for self expression.

Lawrence Fertig

#23. 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

#24. The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

#25. But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness. ( ... ) Health and happiness are the expression of the manner in which the individual responds and adapts to the challenges that he meets in everyday life.

Rene Dubos

#26. To express oneself fluently involves more than simply speaking the language properly. It includes inflection, voice, posture, gestures, and clothing. All of these elements add up to an individual's personal expression. They are the elements of style.

Kate Betts

#27. Each of us has a purpose for living beyond our own survival and pleasure. Every individual is like a thread in a beautiful tapestry with a vital contribution to make, not only to the sustenance of life as we know it, but in the creation and development of more beneficial expressions of life.

John Templeton

#28. Man is free Woyzeck. Man is the ultimate expression of the individual urge to freedom.

Georg Buchner

#29. The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being.

Thomas I. Emerson

#30. Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to a problem or new modes of expression; thus it brings into existence something new to the individual and to the culture.

Betty Edwards

#31. I saw the charter as an expression of my long-held view that the subject of law must be the individual human being; the law must permit the individual to fulfil himself or herself to the utmost.

Pierre Trudeau

#32. It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.

Lady Gregory

#33. Everyone of our relationships with nature and man must be a definite expression of our real, individual life.

Karl Marx

#34. The field of creativity that exists within each individual is freed by moving out of ideas of wrong-doing or right-doing. If we can answer 'yes' to the question. 'Is my self-worth as strong as my self-critic?' then we are ready to engage our creative expression.

Angeles Arrien

#35. The French have no such expression as 'killing time.' In their more philosophical vocabulary the term is 'passing time,' which means savoring all moments of it each to his individual enjoyment. While we battle with time, they relax with tempo.

Cornelia Otis Skinner

#36. For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave.

Justin Frankel

#37. Everything I love: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

Christopher Hitchens

#38. How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Vladimir Nabokov

#39. The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

Yann Martel

#40. Each individual work serves as an expression of our most personal state of mind at that particular moment and of the inescapable, imperative need for release by means of an appropriate act of creation: in the rhythm, form, colour and mood of a picture.

Lyonel Feininger

#41. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor ... to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.

Robert M. Pirsig

#42. America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.

Jonathan Haidt

#43. So is jealousy natural? It depends. Fear is certainly natural, and like any other kind of insecurity, jealousy is an expression of fear. But whether or not someone else's sex life provokes fear depends on how sex is defined in a given society, relationship, and individual's personality.

Christopher Ryan

#44. Every individual's purpose in tithing is to open up his/her awareness of universal laws. Tithing opens you, to you. You are an unlimited individual, deprived of a fuller, richer life partly because of lack of the tithing experience and expression in life.

Mark Victor Hansen

#45. While it is democratically not permissible for an individual to own any information or publishing medium, all individuals have a natural right to self-expression by any means, even if such means were insane and meant to prove a person's insanity.

Muammar Al-Gaddafi

#46. There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.

James R Newman

#47. All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.

Oskar Kokoschka

#48. We all do things in a certain individual way, according to our temperaments.
Every human act - no matter how large or how small - is a direct expression of
a man's personality, and bears the inevitable impress of his nature.

S. S. Van Dine

#49. Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.

Mary Gaitskill

#50. Play Therapy is based upon the fact that play is the child's natural medium of self-expression. It is an opportunity which is given to the child to 'play out' his feelings and problems just as, in certain types of adult therapy, an individual 'talks out' his difficulties.

Virginia Axline

#51. The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears. It was wrought both as the organ of the national interest and as the bulwark of certain individual and local rights.

Herbert Croly

#52. The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.

Robert Grudin

#53. How could you teach someone to survive? You pointed them in the right direction and hoped they'd swim, not sink. Waving, not drowning. There are more important things in life than individual happiness. It was an easy trap to fall into, mistaking a lack of self-direction for an expression of love.

Lesley Lokko

#54. Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

Allen Ginsberg

#55. Musical expression is never primarily national, but is personal and individual rather. It is so deep, so profound, that it goes beyond and below nationality and gives voice to the most private feeling. In music there is never exact heredity. Each man is an individual.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

#56. The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.

Marita Golden

#57. Individual; that means he has his own special way to communicate, which creates the form of him. In the information age, this expression and communication has become so different.

Ai Weiwei

#58. Family is a collective expression of individual perspective-a living work of art.

Wes Fesler

#59. Go! Go! Go! Go!' said that officer, with an expression as though he considered our Cap an individual of the animal kingdom whom neither Buffon nor any other natural philosopher had ever classified, and who, as a creature of unknown habits, might sometimes be dangerous.

E.D.E.N. Southworth

#60. The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality.

Esther Perel

#61. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Alan W. Watts