The Symbolic Quotes

#1. But it seems that Abraxas has a much greater significance. We may look upon the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of combining the godlike and the devilish." The

Hermann Hesse

#2. Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.

C. G. Jung

#3. The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.

Deepak Chopra

#4. Myths remind us of the symbolic presence within all the lost-and-found adventures that alone can give life meaning. Losing touch with the world of myth means losing the sense that life is deeply meaningful, full of meanings trying to be revealed at each twist and turn in the ongoing drama.

Michael Meade

#5. It is our fall from a simplicity and fullness of life directly experienced, from the sensuous moment of knowing, which leaves a gap that the symbolic can never bridge.

John Zerzan

#6. In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

John Lahr

#7. Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

Shoshana Zuboff

#8. Love, I saw now, was an exterior spiritual force that swept through our bodies in the symbolic forms of eros, then bound us materially, skin and bone, in the symbolic moment of birth.

Andrew Klavan

#9. When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.

Eric Ries

#10. The good thing is that all the symbolic elements are gone, and that which really matters - the core - is left.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

#11. Mars is the symbolic and totally stimulating next objective that could so dominate the next century's exploration efforts. From Mars, the resources of all the asteroids will become readily available.

Buzz Aldrin

#12. the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes.

Lawrence J. Vale

#13. Perhaps the mistake I made at the start of my mandate is not understanding the symbolic dimension of the president's role and not being solemn enough in my acts. A mistake for which I would like to apologise or explain myself and which I will not make again. Now, I know the job.

Nicolas Sarkozy

#14. The belief that myths are somehow less true than the symbolic dream we call 'reality' may be the greatest myth of all.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

#15. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

Jurgen Habermas

#16. Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

Alex Haley

#17. Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressives have lately been losing to conservatives. Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral, emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns.

George Lakoff

#18. Our mathematics is the symbolic counterpart of the universe we perceive, and its power has been continuously enhanced by human exploration.

Mario Livio

#19. Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

Thom Mayne

#20. I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

Anish Kapoor

#21. In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

Michael Graves

#22. The most mysterious feminine factor, the existence that we men, we don't know. It's woman. It's feminine. That's what the sword is about. That's the symbolic meaning of the sword.

Ang Lee

#23. The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.

Thomas Merton

#24. Burning a book is like burning a bra. After the adrenalin rush of the symbolic moment wears off, all you're left with is a pile of ashes and unsupported boobs.

Tim Minchin

#25. As a whole, I am interested in the symbolic, rather than the literal use of the camera.

Clarence John Laughlin

#26. Some servent with no sense of the symbolic had kept the hinges well-oiled during the years of his absence,as if their marital life had merely been cast into temporary abeyance.

Courtney Milan

#27. World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.

Oswald Spengler

#28. Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

Willard Gaylin

#29. The most elementary communication is not possible without some degree of conformity to the "conventions" of the symbolic system.

Talcott Parsons

#30. When the symbolic images developed by the society no longer work, and the images which do work are not those of the society, the individual has nowhere to turn.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#31. Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#32. As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Ad Reinhardt

#33. The Birth-chart has to be understood as the archetype or seed-pattern of one's individual being - as the 'symbolic' form of one's individuality, and therefore also of one's destiny, for the two are identical.

Dane Rudhyar

#34. When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

#35. The ultimate goal of Jungian psychotherapy is to make the symbolic process conscious

Edward F Edinger

#36. Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 311.

C. G. Jung

#37. They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena.

Oscar Wilde

#38. I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors ... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.

John Divola

#39. The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

Roman Jakobson

#40. The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.

Naomi Wolf

#41. Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.

Francois Rabelais

#42. The symbolic significance of individual athletes' achievements has sometimes proved more productive than the negotiations of diplomats or politicians.

Richard Attias

#43. In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connected, or connect the separate.

Georg Simmel

#44. The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Hugo Ball

#45. Remember, Shaw, that the power of the dagger lies not only in the visual, but also the symbolic.

Carla Trueheart

#46. Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die.

Regis Debray

#47. Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic.

Haruki Murakami

#48. In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it's also a symbolic journey - a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#49. The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary ...

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#50. The things that could be derived from the sexual sphere - happiness, endless fun and the end of capitalism - were grossly overestimated. The symbolic overglorification was downright unbearable.

Volkmar Sigusch

#51. And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power's own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia.

Paul Mason

#52. The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

John Zerzan

#53. Source truth exists in greater abundance outside of the symbolic system of words.

Bryant McGill

#54. The maxims of Christian life, which should draw upon the truths of the Gospel, are always partially symbolic of the mind and temperament of those who teach them to us. The former, by their natural sweetness, show us the quality of God's mercy; the latter, by their harshness, show us God's justice.

Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

#55. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

Sebastiao Salgado

#56. Yet all myths are symbolic of some truth," she pointed out, "else they would not endure the ages.

Melissa McPhail

#57. Morgan and Catcher said their manly hellos - consisting of a symbolic head bob from Catcher (of the "You're in my lair now" variety) and a responding nod from Morgan (of the "You are clearly the king of this castle" variety).

Chloe Neill

#58. The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read.

Richard Feynman

#59. Unfortunately, we don't have the option of marriage in our country. We could go to Britain or Spain or Argentina and do something symbolic, but that's not what I want. I want to have the rights of anybody else in my home country. I don't want to be a second-class citizen

Dick Cheney

#60. I think the Bravo test is really important for a number of reasons. It's kind of symbolic. It raises a lot of the issues that are related to the whole controversy over nuclear testing.

Martha Smith

#61. Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.

Eamon Duffy

#62. When women breached the power structure in the 1980s?two economies finally merged. Beauty was no longer just a symbolic form of currency: it literally became money.

Naomi Wolf

#63. In 1994, the College Board changed the test's name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Scholastic Assessment Test. Now according to the College Board, the letters don't stand for anything anymore. Perhaps that itself is symbolic.

Alexandra Robbins

#64. The extraordinary and unique quality of the disabled body, I argue, can be seen not only as resisting identification but also, and conversely, as providing a symbolic and actual basis on which to structure a system of identification that seeks to fix individual bodily identity.

Ellen Samuels

#65. That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.

G. Willow Wilson

#66. I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.

Joseph Beuys

#67. In my defense, the Easter Bunny is the weakest link in magical lore. I mean, you have to admit that the whole thing is ridiculous. A giant rodent who sneaks into people's homes at night to leave eggs filled with candy? How in the world is that symbolic of the Easter celebration?

Autumn Doughton

#68. Over the long term, symbolic attempts at appearing cool end up replacing honest charity that actually helps people. In most cases, social consciousness, really, is a simplistic strategy to mask a lazy intellect and fulfill a desperate need for attention.

Greg Gutfeld

#69. on the meanings of the behaviors rather than the behaviors themselves. Chapter 2 reviews the historical roots of identity theory, not only in symbolic interaction, but also, just as crucially, in the cybernetics

Anonymous

#70. The holiday specifies that everyone recline during the meal. It is a symbolic gesture showing that Jews can eat with leisure because they have been freed from bondage.

Karl Katz

#71. To speak, therefore, of an electric current in the nerves, is to use quite as symbolic an expression as if we compared the action of the nervous principle with light or magnetism.

Johannes P. Muller

#72. I think a cyber-terrorism attack is overblown, though the threat exists. I think al Qaeda and other groups are more interested in symbolic terrorism, like what they did to the World Trade Center - suicide bombers or something that really has an effect and is meaningful to people.

Kevin Mitnick

#73. I see some recurring themes: things that feel threaded together, some symbolic references, and songs about some of the big questions, like death. There are a lot of references to weather, too!

Tracy Chapman

#74. I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.

Aaron Sorkin

#75. Having the vote is just symbolic. There are still many issues on which women don't have any right and, in many countries, where women are given very very few rights.

Sarah Gavron

#76. Common knowledge depends not only on me knowing that you receive a message but also on the existence of a shared symbolic system which allows me to know how you understand it.

Michael Suk-Young Chwe

#77. It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag on the moon.

Mary Roach

#78. Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.

Carl Jung

#79. Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.

Jacob Bronowski

#80. I was getting a little bored with my hair. It's kind of a symbolic thing, just getting rid of the past, moving forward. It's amazing what a reaction you get when you cut your hair.

Pamela Anderson

#81. Golden years' must have been coined by the young. It is doubtful that anyone over seventy would have described this phase of life with such a symbolic word.

Billy Graham

#82. I am hopeful that Antarctica in its symbolic robe of white will shine forth as a continent of peace as nations working together there in the cause of science set an example of international cooperation.

Richard E. Byrd

#83. It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects ... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.

Anatol Rapoport

#84. The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life.

Mary Pratt

#85. I don't believe in symbolic gods.I believe that god exists all around us.In the flow of the river,in the rustle of the trees,in the whisper of the winds. He speaks to us all the time.all we need to do is listen.

Amish Tripathi

#86. If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.

Norman Thomas

#87. What an amazing creative way to magnify, and illuminate the courage of 30 Sheroes whose courage, leadership and character is symbolic of the many unsung Women Sheroes of past and present.

Emory Douglas

#88. When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

#89. By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.

Herbert A. Simon

#90. It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

G.K. Chesterton

#91. Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.

Michael Marshall Smith

#92. The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society.

Alexander Downer

#93. The idea is that the woman's heritage and background are just as important as the man's. Many women see taking a man's name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It's like saying to the woman, 'Who you are as a person isn't as important as who I am.

Rhoda Janzen

#94. Presents are symbolic. When you give them in your personal life, they should show that you are paying attention to the person to whom you're giving them.

Judith Martin

#95. 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

#96. Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries.

Wendy Doniger

#97. When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

Paula McLain

#98. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.

Cornel West

#99. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.

Daniel Bell

#100. The answer cannot be found
In the writing of others,
Or the words of a trained mind
In a precious world of memories;
We find ourselves confined

Chuck Schuldiner