Top 100 Quotes About Symbolism
#1. If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.
Roger Ebert
#2. After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
Sigmund Freud
#3. In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
Roman Jakobson
#4. The creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally with primitive symbolism and rigorous logic.
Frank X. Barron
#5. If you wear a hoodie but aren't registered to vote, you got the symbolism but missed the substance.
Jesse Jackson
#6. I hate metaphors. That's why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal.
Ron Swanson
#8. I'm probably the most loquacious author when it comes to my dedications. The reason is there is some symbolism there. I've been writing these books, bringing these stories to my readers who I love so much, and I have a greater love for my family.
Karen Kingsbury
#9. All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.
Carl Jung
#10. The symbolism in any kind of dance allows for recall, reenactment, and reexperience of events for purposes of resisting, reducing, transforming, and escaping stress.
Judith Lynne Hanna
#11. Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#12. Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams.
Mason Cooley
#13. No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.
Edward Sapir
#14. I support mosques, obviously. We need churches, temples, mosques. Whatever people use to speak with their god or to receive spiritual inspiration is good for the country. But the symbolism of it at ground zero, within two blocks or three blocks, I believe is wrong.
Peter T. King
#15. In TV and movies, you kill yourself spending all this time to think up the symbolism or what if that deer that runs across your hero's path somehow conveys what's going on inside your hero's head? When a lot of times, you just want to hear what he's thinking.
Eric Kripke
#16. Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.
Nadeem Aslam
#17. Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.
Stephen Leacock
#18. For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.
Maurice Ravel
#19. In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.
William Butler Yeats
#20. 97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess.
98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances.
99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her.
Donald Barthelme
#21. Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.
Carrie Coon
#22. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. She touches her wrist where her watch used to be, her fingers lost without time to hold on to.
Jenny Hubbard
#24. What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#25. Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.
Shirin Neshat
#26. Sure, society understands visible shackles-- they get the symbolism of the wheelchair, of prosthetics, of a bumper sticker reading disabled veteran, but they still struggle for comprehension of the profound, invisible shackles that an illness such as [Chronic Fatigue] puts on a person's body.
Peggy Munson
#27. The symbolism in Jesus' parables is never thickly layered, and rarely even multidimensional.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#28. Religious ceremonial nowadays provides less opportunity for bad language and sexual symbolism.
Aubrey De Selincourt
#29. The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. I knew that meant we were done and that we'd smooth over the surface I'd just tossed a rock into, but even the waves that crash down on the beach start out as tiny ripples, far out at sea.
They just gain strength over time.
Jessi Kirby
#31. Mortal minds are always unsettled by eternal things; they want to catch the infinite and nail it down to something finite. Impossible!
Seth Adam Smith
#32. You know, when you're in your twenties you use a great deal of symbolism. You somehow think that a character standing beneath a cross is more interesting than a character standing underneath a billboard, but when you get a little older you realize that there's not much difference.
Paul Schrader
#33. Directive design gives an either/or choice, similar to a traffic sign. Interpretive design allows for personal choice, in the same way symbolism allows for individual meaning.
Maggie Macnab
#34. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
Haruki Murakami
#35. Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.
Grant Morrison
#36. The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.
Judith Martin
#37. I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#38. I have painted and drawn bulls for some time because of their density and all the symbolism they carry.
Paul Emsley
#40. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
Patti Smith
#41. The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
Patrick O'Brian
#42. There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Arthur C. Clarke
#43. As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?
Carol Berg
#46. The heart, said to be man's noblest organ, has the same shape as the penis, commonly supposed the most ignoble; the symbolism is not inappropriate, because the love which comes from the heart soon extends to the organ which it resembles.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#47. Witchcraft promotes the advantages of learning and applying new symbolism into one's psyche, this is the witches code.
Gede Parma
#48. A fundamental error in many Christian attacks on Harry Potter has been a narrow, simplistic reading of symbolism.
Travis Prinzi
#49. I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.
Chino Moreno
#50. Chocolate symbolizes, as does no other food, luxury, comfort, sensuality, gratification, and love.
Karl Petzke
#51. Everything you see is merely a symbol for things you do not see.
Seth Adam Smith
#52. A thought weaves into another thought, seeking the other.
The thought world has its-own Inner Life.
A rose acts upon us through its symbolism, through its beauty, through our conscious & sub-conscious mind.
Meditating we tap into the thought form of 'rose adoration'.
Natasa Nuit Pantovic
#53. One could say that my view legitimately fuses the end-time messianic expectations of all three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity!
Eli Of Kittim
#54. What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky!
Eli Of Kittim
#55. All religious expression is symbolism.
Albert Pike
#56. All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.
Edwin Powell Hubble
#57. God does not refuse to make himself known to man. He only will not do it by the symbolism of matter. He comes to us at once by the most natural course. We are in a transient state; our bodies are accidental, and God comes to us by that which is higher and truer
the intuitions of the soul.
Henry Ward Beecher
#58. In my view, the gospels are true, not historically, but theologically, or, as I would argue, prophetically! What we have is, the Messiah's history written in advance in story form.
Eli Of Kittim
#59. When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
Christopher Lasch
#60. If in the place of God we write "Reality", "Nature", "Unknowable", or "Zero", it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.
J. F. C. Fuller
#61. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Stephen King
#62. The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.
Al Gore
#63. If we fail to understand the biblical story of Jesus, we will compromise our prophetic interpretations of the end-times. And that's exactly what we've done.
Eli Of Kittim
#64. Superficially insignificant or accidental looking detail (in art) may well carry the most important unconscious symbolism.
Anton Ehrenzweig
#66. The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war.
Carl Sagan
#67. As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
Will Durant
#68. Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.
Sebastiao Salgado
#69. Sex is the glue of relationships, Caitlin, and it's what life is all about. It's the opposite of death, of giving up, of getting swamped by... What's out there. See it as symbolic.
Mark Chadbourn
#70. The Biblical worldview is not given to us in the discursive and analytical language of philosophy and science, but in rich and compact language of symbolism and art.
James Jordan
#71. I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.
Haruki Murakami
#72. Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves ... and other animals.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#73. I think that a symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. To exorcise it, to rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it inform, and then rearranging it.
Sarah Charlesworth
#74. In the vast majority of cases the secret society symbolism hearkens from two places - Ireland and Egypt.
Michael Tsarion
#75. I question the negative connotations of fabric, of ribbon, of lace. I turn these symbols of our imprisonment around.
Miriam Schapiro
#76. Does it make all the difference in the world? No. But there's a great deal of symbolism associated with whether we're going to add $24 billion to the debt in unwanted and unnecessary pork-barrel projects.
John McCain
#77. I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.
Catherine Lowell
#78. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
Thomas C. Foster
#79. It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.
Rinker Buck
#81. I have been talking nonstop about the symbolism of an edible landscape at the White House. I think it says everything about stewardship of the land and about the nourishment of a nation.
Alice Waters
#82. Its real symbolism is not to the westward expansion of the nineteenth century, but to the power and dominance of the United States in the twentieth century.
Tracy Campbell
#83. Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.
Linn Ullmann
#84. The Earth, dost thou say? What has the Earth ever realized, that drop of frozen mud, whose Time is only a lie in the Heavens?
Villiers De L'Isle-Adam
#85. Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.
Eric Temple Bell
#86. The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.
Jean Cocteau
#87. 'Pomegranate,' started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.
Ori Gersht
#88. Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.
John Schlesinger
#89. You are taking things far too literally. Everything you see is merely a symbol for things you do not see. Most of the people of this world are asleep in their minds.
Seth Adam Smith
#90. The ultimate storyteller is Shakespeare, who was able to get the 'groundlings' to laugh at his bawdy humor and storylines but could still be studied by scholars to this day for the complexity of his language, meter, and symbolism. That's the real guy.
Jon Favreau
#91. Years ago, Myron had found this all somewhat poignant and oddly comforting - the war relic now housing artists - but the world was different now. In the eighties and nineties, it had all been cute and quaint. Now this "progress" felt like phony symbolism. Near
Harlan Coben
#92. Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty. This is pristine natural beauty. it is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal, a beauty derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations.
Gao Xingjian
#93. Love wants to be confirmed with concrete symbols, but recklessness loves instability.
Franz Grillparzer
#95. I am automatically suspicious of things that wave their symbolism around and do little dances and bludgeon you over the head so that you [Darn] Well Know There's A Symbol Here.
Ursula Vernon
#96. It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.
Albert Pike
#97. Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
Jack Kerouac
#98. This is the worst of our ways of remembering
this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.
Kamila Shamsie
#99. I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.
Hassan Blasim
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