Top 100 Quotes About Symbolism
#1. After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
Sigmund Freud
#2. 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
#3. The creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally with primitive symbolism and rigorous logic.
Frank X. Barron
#4. If you wear a hoodie but aren't registered to vote, you got the symbolism but missed the substance.
Jesse Jackson
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams.
Mason Cooley
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The symbolism in Jesus' parables is never thickly layered, and rarely even multidimensional.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#21. Religious ceremonial nowadays provides less opportunity for bad language and sexual symbolism.
Aubrey De Selincourt
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.
Grant Morrison
#26. The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.
Judith Martin
#27. 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
#28. I have painted and drawn bulls for some time because of their density and all the symbolism they carry.
Paul Emsley
#29. 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
#30. There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Arthur C. Clarke
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. Witchcraft promotes the advantages of learning and applying new symbolism into one's psyche, this is the witches code.
Gede Parma
#35. A fundamental error in many Christian attacks on Harry Potter has been a narrow, simplistic reading of symbolism.
Travis Prinzi
#36. I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.
Chino Moreno
#37. 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
#38. All religious expression is symbolism.
Albert Pike
#39. All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.
Edwin Powell Hubble
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Stephen King
#43. 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
#44. Superficially insignificant or accidental looking detail (in art) may well carry the most important unconscious symbolism.
Anton Ehrenzweig
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. In the vast majority of cases the secret society symbolism hearkens from two places - Ireland and Egypt.
Michael Tsarion
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. '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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
Jack Kerouac
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The ocean is a central image. It is the symbolism of a great journey.
Enya
#70. I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#71. The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.
David Icke
#72. Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.
Andrew Eldritch
#73. Thus the creative genius may be at once nave and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.
Frank X. Barron
#74. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#75. When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.
Gene Tierney
#76. I have always said to my pupils: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."
Carl Jung
#77. Are you Catholic?" "Recovering," he admitted. "Me, too. The symbolism, though - " "It still resonates." "Yeah.
Blair Babylon
#78. It is hard to write, not, as might be expected, for reasons of metre or scholarship or elaborate symbolism, but because the actual writing depends almost entirely on the chance, the mood, the energy, of the moment.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#79. It began in images and it ended in symbolism.
B.W. Powe
#80. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.
Stephen King
#81. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.
Kenzo Tange
#82. Mahatma Gandhi was a man of peace and non-violence and lived by the Hindu principle of ahimsa, action based on refusal to do harm. As his war-strewn presidency shows, George Bush knows nothing about ahimsa and non-violence. Bush should reconsider this cynical, disrespectful display of symbolism.
Kevin Martin
#83. And it's only symbolism puts magic and meaning into anything. You of all people should know that. We can make love amongst the gods, or we can screw on a dirty mattress. It's our choice.
Alan Moore
#84. I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.
Ira Glass
#85. Man enters into the ethical world through fear and not through love. - Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil.
Tami Hoag
#86. Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language.
Manly Hall
#87. The profuse phallic symbolism of chess provides some fantasy gratification of the homosexual wish, particularly the desire for mutual masturbation.
Reuben Fine
#88. There's a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?
Steve Jobs
#89. There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#90. What they will try to do is get symbolic victories. Symbolism is important to them. They have little else. But they will strike, I believe, at centers of media, of financial, of American power, of American culture; and that is where we should place our bet.
James T. Walsh
#91. Given a choice between discussing the symbolism of a pig head on a stick and discussing my feelings, I'll take the pig head every time.
Michael Thomas Ford
#92. Traditional symbolism assumes that the celestial is primordial and that the terrestrial is but a reflection or image of it: the higher contains the meaning of the lower.
J.C. Cooper
#93. Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.
Gloria Steinem
#94. Tautology and contradiction are, however, not senseless; they are part of the symbolism, in the same way that "0" is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#95. I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.
The Weeknd
#96. He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism ...
Walter J. Moore
#97. Here I was looking for symbolism and metaphors and um ... sometimes a duck is just a duck!
Mr. Tushman
R.J. Palacio
#98. Oh, come off it. That surly cunt is squirming like a snake."
"Could there be some sort of Freudian symbolism in your choice of similes?"
"What?"
"Forget it ...
Stieg Larsson
#99. I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.
Bob Dylan
#100. Attempting to contain the infinite within finite symbolism of language may result in scholarship, but it will not produce devotion. (110)
Prem Prakash
