Self Expression Quotes

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.”
― Harvey Fierstein

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Keep your best wishes, close to your heart and watch what happens”
― Tony DeLiso, Legacy: The Power Within

“Never dull your shine for somebody else.”
― Tyra Banks

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
― Martha Graham

“Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for”
― Oliver James

“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”
― Ansel Adams

“I don't believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door

“These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling”
― Tony DeLiso, Legacy: The Power Within

“Everyone has their own ways of expression. I believe we all have a lot to say, but finding ways to say it is more than half the battle.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”
― Edward Hopper

“I want freedom for the full expression of my personality.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
― Aldous Huxley

“None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
― Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.”
― Aesop

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”
― Ansel Adams

“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Only when I'm dancing can I feel this free.”
― Madonna

“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.”
― Zadie Smith

“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov