Quotes About Symbols

#1. Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh ... And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.

Dan Brown

#2. The gift of intuition may bless you with powerful symbols that convey feelings, energy and emotions beyond what words could ever express.

Catherine Carrigan

#3. I believe the reason we sleep is not just to allow our body to rest but that it is to allow this inner wisdom to speak to us through symbols. This includes the body or somatic problems as well as psychological ones. Dreams and drawings are useful in diagnosing physical conditions.

Bernie Siegel

#4. Stone and sea are deep in life
Two unalterable symbols of the world
Permanence at rest
And permanence in motion
Participants in the power that remains

Stephen R. Donaldson

#5. In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.

Stephen Bayley

#6. The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#7. I want to be part of your story. I want your story to rearrange the symbols in my mind. I want your voice to be my voice.

David Bowles

#8. Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

Richard Rohr

#9. How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?

Cameron Conaway

#10. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

Mark Twain

#11. Realities disguised as symbols are, for me, new realities that are immeasurably preferable. I make an effort to take them at their word. To grasp, to carry out the diktat of images to the letter.

Claude Cahun

#12. Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols ... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

Alfred Korzybski

#13. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition

Naomi Wolf

#14. I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.

Charles Handy

#15. The position of the planetary bodies at the moment of birth is a musical score done in planetary symbols of the heavenly harmonics and dissonances as these are played into the life of the incarnating ego.

Corinne Heline

#16. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

Damon Knight

#17. Life is so full of portents and signs and symbols that it's a wonder not everyone is a writer.

Susan Juby

#18. Human nature doesn't change. When enough people are comfortable enough financially, there is going to be human nature that wants to spend more money on better quality and, to some degree, status symbols as well.

Danny Meyer

#19. Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

Aldous Huxley

#20. We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.

John Hench

#21. Symbols are miracles we have recorded into language.

S. Kelley Harrell

#22. Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past. Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present.

Oscar Hijuelos

#23. Empty women, who strive for no good but exist to adorn themselves ... These women of majestic pride, fantastic coiffures, outlandish ornament, and necks bound with gold or pearls bear the glittering symbols of their captivity to men.

Laura Cereta

#24. It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words - are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?

Neal Stephenson

#25. Those very superficial sensualists and profligates who lead the dance of Latin decadence have not seen, among their dancing girls and their pennies, that the disappearance of symbols was a precursor to the ruin of a people; communities only have abstract reasons for existing...

Josephin Peladan

#26. There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.

Richard Wright

#27. A language you cannot speak yourself is not necessarily a god-awful mess, Celia says, transcribing a line of symbols into her notebook.

Erin Morgenstern

#28. Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Oscar Wilde

#29. When you can type a few words into a search engine and land on your topic - or when you can scan a Shakespeare play for specific words or symbols - what opportunities might you miss to expand your thinking in unexpected ways?

Christina Baker Kline

#30. Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters ... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

Ernest Hemingway,

#31. Humans have invented all kinds of symbols to communicate not only with other humans but more importantly with ourselves.

Jose Luis Ruiz

#32. 'I shall have heaven and earth for my coffin and its shell; the sun and moon for my two round symbols of jade, the stars and constellations for my pearls and jewels; and all things assisting as the mourners. Will not the provisions for my funeral be complete? What could you add to them?'

Zhuangzi

#33. Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#34. Any society which suppresses the heritage of its conquered minorities, prevents their history or denies them their symbols, has sown the seeds of their own destruction.

William Wallace

#35. We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.

Thomas C. Foster

#36. It is because we have such shallow views of God's love that we have such defective views of God's dealings. We blindly interpret the symbols of His providence, because we so imperfectly read the engravings of His heart.

Octavius Winslow

#37. 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

#38. Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the way they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols.

James Davison Hunter

#39. The soap in the bathroom, the flowers in the garden, the book on the bedside table are all strong symbols of a life in progress. You look at these details and a world unfolds.

Charlotte Moss

#40. Public symbols matter. They are one of the ways we tell each other, and the world, what we honor.

Michael W. McConnell

#41. The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them.

Oscar Wilde

#42. The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man's interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#43. The seed, swollen with moisture, burst asunder its covering of soil and out peers the blade of wheat, full of symbols. So faith, whose bosom is filled with goodly fruits, is a blade of praise.

Ephrem The Syrian

#44. The individual artist is a medium for making representational and deeply meaningful symbols of the community's collective consciousness, whether they are symbols of the community's religion, love, hurt, power, hate, hope, dream, fables, foibles or on and on and on.

Inga Muscio

#45. the poorly typed lines, the symbols and abbreviations of Internet chat that make such language seem so much like a process of decay. As

Garth Greenwell

#46. He disliked wearing his uniform and always changed out of it right away when he came home. Symbols of authority irritated him - unless the authority was his own.

Edith Hahn Beer

#47. Israel must remove the two blue stripes from its national flag. The stripes on the flag are symbols of occupation. They signify Israel's borders stretching from the River Euphrates to the River Nile.

Mahmoud Al-Zahar

#48. A brick and a blanket are the perfect symbols for the superhero Captain Dense.

Nicole McKay

#49. When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

Richard Wagner

#50. Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process, and store symbols.

Vilem Flusser

#51. Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet.

Dean Cavanagh

#52. No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of prejudice.

Dan Brown

#53. Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

Mary Robinson

#54. When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.

William H. Hunt

#55. Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.

Anselm Kiefer

#56. Racing is an escape from society. From symbols of status, and self-perception. A chance to just be. For everyone to just be, with each other.

Erin Beresini

#57. We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.

Jacques Lacan

#58. Nourishing spirituality means cultivating the inward space, the basis of which all things can be brought together. It means overwhelming deadness and stagnation and living reality in terms of values, inspiration, and symbols of higher meaning.

Leonardo Boff

#59. Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#60. [This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

John Green

#61. I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

Jodi Picoult

#62. The mass migration of the poorest of the poor to America is bad for the whole country, but it's fantastic for Democrats. Ask yourself: Which party benefits from illiterate non-English speakers who have absolutely no idea what they're voting for, but can be instructed to learn certain symbols?

Ann Coulter

#63. Birds are born to have wings; wings are symbols of freedom.

Nancy Yi Fan

#64. We know that children with autism like order, that they are often very visual and that they can be quite literal. They deserve beautiful resources and symbols that make sense. If a picture does not explain visually, it is pointless and the child will stop looking to the pictures for information.

Adele Devine

#65. It's more common for people to get fire tattoos. Symbols of passion, transformation, change. But I wanted smoke because it's what remains. After the fire, after everything is destroyed, you're left with smoke and ash. You've gotta make somethin' out of it.

Kate Meader

#66. A residual sea of symbols which is shared by all mankind, usually accessed through dreams or altered states, and from which cultures draw images on which to found their religions.

Carl Jung

#67. If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

L.L. Barkat

#68. The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged. For them, the racial bribe was primarily psychological.

Michelle Alexander

#69. A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words - or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols - spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges

#70. Music and symbols, they're older than human race.
Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind.

Toba Beta

#71. Black men and women who refuse to live under oppression are dangerous to white society because they become symbols of hope to their brothers and sisters, inspiring them to follow their example.

Huey Newton

#72. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

#73. Symbols

A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.

All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.

Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid.

W.B.Yeats

#74. The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

Stewart O'Nan

#75. We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.

Kenneth Clark

#76. The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

George Stillman Hillard

#77. Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

Tennessee Williams

#78. Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas and not the ideas themselves.

Ken Bain

#79. It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

Pablo Picasso

#80. The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.

C.S. Lewis

#81. Busts, carvings, engravings, and symbols of King Ludwig's

Chris Colfer

#82. The central thought of the Scriptures is that God intends to work Himself in Christ through the Spirit into us, that God and we, we and God, might be really one in life, in nature, and in the Spirit. To show this God uses several figures or symbols in the Bible.

Witness Lee

#83. Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret - these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.

Tariq Ramadan

#84. When we use numbers we are using symbols, and it is only when we transfer them to life that they become actualities. The same is true with drawing and painting. They are to be learned, not as rules, but as actualities. Then the rules become appropriate.

Kimon Nicolaides

#85. You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at.

Robert Gober

#86. 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

#87. America's veterans and troops serving abroad today fought hard to preserve our red, white and blue, from the Revolutionary War to today's Global War Against Terrorism, and Congress' action today is appropriate for one of our most sacred symbols.

Bill Shuster

#88. Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Joyce Carol Oates

#89. The best leaders ... almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.

Tom Peters

#90. They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise.

Thomas Merton

#91. A Socialist State demands precisely the same human symbols as that of Fascist or Nazi, and the same surrender of human liberties if it is to succeed.

Eden Phillpotts

#92. No symbols where none intended.

Samuel Beckett

#93. Some people, of course, can be happier with the cars, the fancy threads, the hilltop mansion, and the other status symbols of 'having made it', but I found that several of my most prized possessions were slipping away, despite all the fortune I had amassed.

George Harrison

#94. Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

James Webb Young

#95. When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.

Simon Van Booy

#96. Numerical logistic is that which employs numbers; symbolic logistic that which uses symbols, as, say, the letters of the alphabet.

Francois Viete

#97. Love wants to be confirmed with concrete symbols, but recklessness loves instability.

Franz Grillparzer

#98. I don't have an extensive background in theory, but the amount of it that I've learned, I've applied, so I have a vocabulary of melodic and rhythmic relationships. And that's all theory is - it's symbols to help you identify those relationships.

John Frusciante

#99. Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

Jim Morrison

#100. Government sponsorship of religious activity, including prayer services, sacred symbols, religious festivals, and the like, tends to secularize the religious activity rather than make government more ethical or religious.

John M Swomley