Top 100 Quotes About Symbols
#1. For we never have naked and empty symbols, except when our ingratitude and wickedness hinder the working of divine beneficence.
John Calvin
#2. I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.
Steven Hall
#3. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#5. The painter who strives to represent reality must transcend his own perception. He must ignore or override the very mechanismsin his mInd that create objects out of images(symbols) ... The artist, like the eye, must provide true images and the clues of distance to tell his magic lies.
Colin Blakemore
#6. My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.
Libba Bray
#7. Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences
Albert Bandura
#8. There are the altars, but here is the greatest of altars, the living, conscious human body, and to worship at this altar is far higher than the worship of any dead symbols.
Swami Vivekananda
#9. To me locs are a symbol of strength and beauty
Zendaya
#10. Probably our lives are full of symbols which only an unacknowledged sense perceives. Spiritual events assume a material guise, in accordance with some creative principle, but do not insist on recognition. ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
#11. Symbols need not limit their scope to this pendulum swing of images.
Rene Crevel
#12. As far as inspiration goes, I'm constantly inspired by traveling, symbols, magic and different cultural traditions around the world.
Pamela Love
#13. In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.
John B. S. Haldane
#14. While this might seem a bit abstract, these numbers are not arbitrary. They are symbols, which represent pieces of paper, which represent pieces of gold. Gold doesn't represent anything; its value is inherent in its glitter.
Colin MacLaughlin
#15. Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols ... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it.
Russell Baker
#16. A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.
Edward Sapir
#17. it is quite impossible for us men clothed about with this dense covering of flesh to understand or speak of the divine and lofty and immaterial energies of the Godhead, except by the use of images and types and symbols derived from our own life(7).
John Damascene
#18. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths - until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Vladimir Nabokov
#19. I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.
Jorge Luis Borges
#20. Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience.
Keith Devlin
#21. Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
Herbert Spencer
#22. I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.
Susan Abulhawa
#23. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.
Christian Wiman
#24. [A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things , more handle people and symbols .
C. Wright Mills
#25. The Forest has symbols of its own. A Forest is a maze, a mesh, a network of pictures, sounds, smells and tastes running across the animals, the trees and the birds; and around each other. It has its own ingenious ways of connecting,
Surajit Das
#26. The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.
Richard Misrach
#27. All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
Albert Schweitzer
#28. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.
Jonathan Culver
#29. The hijab, or sikh turban, or Jewish skullcap are all explicit symbols, but they do not represent a threat or affront to others, and have no bearing on the competence, skills and intelligence of a person.
Randa Abdel-Fattah
#30. Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.
George Henry Lewes
#31. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras.
Fareed Zakaria
#33. Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real. Why,
Andrew Klavan
#34. 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
#35. Holy symbols like crosses and blessed water occasionally have an effect, but are dependent upon the personal faith of the user. Most Hunters opt for violence over faith; we're kind of like soccer fans that way.
Larry Correia
#36. Or an amicable pair," said Sam. "Sorry?" "In math, that's what we call two numbers each of which is equal to the sum of the divisors of the other. The smallest ones, 220 and 284, were regarded by the Pythagoreans as symbols of true friendship.
Reginald Hill
#37. Great are the symbols of Being, But that which is symboled is greater;
Vast the create and beheld, But vaster the Inward Creator.
Richard Realf
#38. You may tell me that my hand and foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence. I could believe you, but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the spiritual is not the true and real part of me.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#39. A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.
Lewis Mumford
#40. She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.
Robin McKinley
#41. There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.
Gerry Abbey
#42. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.
Aldous Huxley
#43. Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As
Kate Millett
#44. Love: a hybrid emotion made up of various other emotions collaged by some weak individual's mind to try to quell a particular horror that's not been wiped out by more standardized symbols like Christ, etc. Nietzsche, right? Whatever.
Dennis Cooper
#45. Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand
an extended application of its powers.
Dion Fortune
#47. Such things as are good simply because they have been commanded or instituted, or as being symbols of something good, are mere shadows which cannot be reckoned among actions that are the offspring, as it were, or fruit of a sound mind and of intellect.
Baruch Spinoza
#48. Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. Still,
Greg Egan
#49. Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols ... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
Antonin Artaud
#50. She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state?
Azar Nafisi
#52. Money can purchase the symbols but not the causes of serenity and buoyancy. In a straightforward way we must agree that money cannot buy happiness.
John Armstrong
#53. Signs and symbols. They were everything to an occultist. Witness: the sign of the ring. How easily it slipped from her finger as Alexander Kale reached across the sleeping woman in his bed and nimbly removed her wedding ring.
Howard F. Clarke
#55. The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.
C. G. Jung
#56. In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.
Carl Jung
#57. Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.
Heinrich Heine
#58. Luckless is that country in which the symbols of procreation are held in horror!' he wrote, 'while the agents of destruction are revered!
Rikki Ducornet
#59. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment- for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.
Carl Jung
#60. If you'd like to see how to apply these ideas directly to memorizing formulas, try out the SkillsToolbox website for a list of easy-to-remember visuals for mathematical symbols.7
Barbara Oakley
#61. The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who had also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men.
Jeff Shaara
#62. If philosophy gets you lost in the labyrinth of symbols that distance us from reality, then it is part of the problem; if it motivates positive action that can create a better world, philosophy is usually a gift.
Oli Anderson
#63. We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.
Whitney M. Young
#65. Reign of blows cascading down upon your shoulders Far too many men dressed up as soldiers The lamb is brought to the ground Under the weight of the Crown A crown of thorns and dark deeds The swastika and the hammer and sickle Are symbols that reap only weeds
Andy Partridge
#66. The whole world has gone back to something we are genetically engineered to do - communicating through symbols.
James Woods
#67. I think the benefit of a Catholic childhood is your belief in visual symbols as transmitters of information and clues about life, whether it's the mystery of life or life in general.
Robert Gober
#68. And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
William Gibson
#69. Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
Henri Bergson
#70. Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?'
Tracy Chapman
#71. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.
Don DeLillo
#72. Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
John Maynard Keynes
#73. The Japanese covet important symbols - their heroic past as enshrined in Yasukuni, the Imperial family which has never been sullied by scandal.
F. Sionil Jose
#74. Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. took the slip from his hand and looked at the strangle symbols.
Donna Augustine
#76. Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.
Ray Bradbury
#78. We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
Angela Carter
#79. For all its complexity, however, astrology remains fundamentally simple. It offers a time-honored system of symbols that sum up key aspects of human life while providing profound insights and practical guidance.
Anne M. Nordhaus-Bike
#80. The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life.
Mary Pratt
#81. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#82. Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.
Peter Redgrove
#83. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.
John C. Wright
#84. I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.
Michael Dirda
#85. Guns were the symbols of judgment and power, so that those who were expected to exercise power and judgment had to wear them and be proficient in their use.
Sean McMullen
#87. Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
Slobodan Milosevic
#88. An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
Sigmund Freud
#89. For centuries after Christ, the church and other religions that use cruciform symbols have misrepresented the physical nature of Christ's death with a satanic symbol (cross), and a pagan idol (corpus). This secret has been concealed by the church for centuries after Christ.
Nwaocha Ogechukwu
#90. Money, fame, class, and titles are just symbols, or opportunities, for making a difference. Real power means enhancing the greater good, and your feelings of power will direct you to the exact way you are best equipped to do this.
Dacher Keltner
#91. That way of inspiration
is always open,
and open to everyone;
it acts as go-between, interpreter,
it explains symbols of the past
in to-day's imagery.
Hilda Doolittle
#92. Religion is simply a tool to put God's love into words and symbols. Doctrine is only useful to the extent it enhances your understanding of that love. God doesn't care about your religion. He cares about your heart.
Reba Riley
#93. No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.
Wendell Phillips
#94. One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.
Christopher Nolan
#95. Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#96. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of predujice.
Dan Brown
#97. These items were nothing but ones and zeros stored on the OASIS servers, but they were also status symbols. Most items only cost a few credits, but since they cost nothing for GSS to manufacture, it was all profit.
Ernest Cline
#98. There are those who would keep us slipping back into the darkness of division, into the snake pit of racial hatred, of racial antagonism and of support for symbols of the struggle to keep African-Americans in bondage.
Carol Moseley Braun
#99. Nature is a temple, where the living
Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing.
Charles Baudelaire
#100. This year, as we celebrate the 230th anniversary of America's independence, please remember the symbols that are sacred to this country. Fly Old Glory high and show your respect and admiration for this great nation and the values we hold dear.
Kenny Marchant
