Top 100 Symbols Of Quotes
#1. For we never have naked and empty symbols, except when our ingratitude and wickedness hinder the working of divine beneficence.
John Calvin
#2. 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
#3. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. To me locs are a symbol of strength and beauty
Zendaya
#8. 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
#9. Symbols need not limit their scope to this pendulum swing of images.
Rene Crevel
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. [A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things , more handle people and symbols .
C. Wright Mills
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.
George Henry Lewes
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand
an extended application of its powers.
Dion Fortune
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life.
Mary Pratt
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
Sigmund Freud
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of predujice.
Dan Brown
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols
& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge
would not have been scared, like you & me,
he would have been, before the bullet that was his,
studying the movements of the birds,
said disappointed & amazed Henry.
John Berryman
#79. The language of images [of inner-oriented artists] does not follow a code structure that is evident and widely accepted, but is more likely to be a complex of symbols that have a profound meaning for the artists themselves.
Kenneth Coutts-Smith
#80. Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth ... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H Gass
#82. I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#83. The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.
Karl Pearson
#84. Facts of experience are valued in Zen more than representations, symbols, and concepts-that is to say, substance is everything in Zen and form nothing.
D.T. Suzuki
#85. They establish contact with the subconscious of the consumer below the word level. They do this with visual symbols instead of words ... They communicate faster. They are more direct. There is no work, no mental effort. Their sole purpose is to create images and moods.
Rosser Reeves
#86. Mitterrand had a sense for symbols, and he was the first Socialist president since 1958. He wanted to show that there is historical continuity, a connection with the great figures of French history.
Francois Hollande
#87. In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life
Ibn Arabi
#88. The symbols of the self arise from the depths of the body.
Carl Jung
#89. When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget the children's birthdays, there's a good chance you've become too wrapped up in your work.
Peter Lynch
#90. Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.
Sue Monk Kidd
#91. Our bodies form a symbol, I think, as powerful as one of Hal's - and it occurs to me that the most meaningful symbols of all must be based on all the different ways two people can embrace.
Neal Shusterman
#92. Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind's pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality.
Sarah Silverman
#93. What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes - the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move.
Terence McKenna
#94. Our best answers in defense of Christianity have always been useless clanging symbols unless our lives have inspired the world to ask.
Rachel Held Evans
#95. It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.
Joseph Campbell
#96. The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself.
Joseph Campbell
#97. She was tired of being a symbol. Symbols were stagnant, frozen, representative, and spurring of action but never the action itself.
Elise Kova
#98. She studied the fabulous frame with its odd symbols, stroking the cool gold of it, trailing her hand down over the silvery glass. Inside the mirror, Cian raised his hand, too, and traced the path of her passage, making it appear as though their fingertips met. She felt only cold glass.
Karen Marie Moning
#99. Living in the modern world, clothed and muffled, forced to convey our sense of our bodies in terms of remote symbols like walking sticks and umbrellas and handbags, it is easy to lose sight of the immediacy of the human body plan.
Margaret Mead
#100. The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
