Quotes About Symbolism

I should have been a pair of ragged claws.' The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see-

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems.

Guénon nous dit une fois que si nous pouvions rencontrer des hommes de l'âge d'or, nous serions frappés par le fait qu'ils parleraient toujours en images et non en langage abstrait. (De l'Esprit symboliste - Études Traditionnelles N°340, juin 1957)

Certains accidents géographiques, par exemple les hautes montagnes, s'apparentent, en raison de leur symbolisme naturel, aux grands sanctuaires primordiaux, et c'est pour cela que les peuples les plus divers, surtout ceux dont la tradition a une forme « mythique » ou « primordiale », évitent de monter jusqu'aux sommets des montagnes, par crainte de provoquer la « colère des Dieux ».

Often statues depicting the Buddha's moment of enlightenment show him touching the ground. This symbolizes that his enlightened state included a firm grounding in this reality instead of serving as an escape from it.

It didn't symbolize their love," Courtney said. "It symbolized all the ways that love can go wrong. It was real, then it was not, it was stolen, it was retrieved. Maybe the ring is bad luck.

Isn't blood a woman's ink?

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.

She saw him as Eros, but Ferrante was convinced that the statue represented Mors, the personification of death. Later that double identity seemed significant to her. When had love become synonymous with death?

All ceremonial events such as initiation (baptism) and incorporation, signs of communal membership, signify in the final analysis the renunciation of the intimate sphere of the person, if not emotionally, as in the bond of a biological blood-based kinship, then nevertheless spiritually, ideationally, and symbolically.

Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It

The golden bowl – as it was to have been.' And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. 'The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.

A valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the tumbrils – red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices through the dikes and lies like glass under the bridges.

The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise.

The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. (revised, correct quote)

To the surgeon his scalpel, to the gravedigger his pick and shovel, to the analyst his dream books, to the fool his dunce cap. As for me, I have a bellyache.

over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat by the roadside.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

Even though white is often associated with things, that are pleasant and pure, there is a peculiar emptiness about the color white. It is the emptiness of the white that is more disturbing, than even the bloodiness of red.

then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship

Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.