Quotes About Symbolism

Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

La bellezza per lei, come per tutti quelli che hanno molto sentito, non risiedeva nelle cose ma in ciò che esse simboleggiavano

Tuttavia era in quella valle che il suo dolore aveva preso forma e Tess non l'amava più come in passato; la bellezza per lei, come per tutti quelli che hanno esperienza, non stava nelle cose, ma in ciò che le cose simboleggiavano.

For when you come to think of it, which is the real shape of the glowworm: the insignificant little creature crawling about on the palm of your hand, or the poetic spark that swims through the summer night?

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of 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.

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.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.

Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)

Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.

As spread thighs are to the libertine...so was the letter V to young Stencil.

WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO'S EMPIRE.

But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen?

But don't they look like apes, now, fighting over a female? Even if the female is named Liberty.

Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming.

Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken. "Basically wishing long life and prosperity," explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.

O, the red rose may be fair, And the lily statelier; But my shamrock, one in three Takes the very heart of me!

I shrugged into my favorite sweatshirt--you know the kind--where the cuffs are worn and torn and all signs of elasticity have long since disappeared. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, the sweatshirt symbolized the person I'd become--well-worn, a bit beat-up, and hanging by a thread.

To me, Herod symbolizes the terrible destruction that fearful people can leave in their wake if their fear is unacknowledged, if they have power but can only use it in furtive, pathetic, and futile attempts at self-preservation.

Within the ring there lies an O, Within the O there looks an eye, In the eye there swims a sea, And in the sea reflected sky, And in the sky there shines the sun, Within the sun a bird of gold.

wrapped themselves in the Rebel flag as a substitute for Klan robes. Symbolism's the same, but the flag's just a little more socially acceptable. And no, I don't particularly like the glorification of a war fought largely by poor, ignorant dirt farmers who died a long way from home for a cause they never understood.

Apple is another word that has always meant itself. In fact, it used to apply to any fruit, vegetable, or even nut. All fruits were apples. The potato was the apple of the earth (and still is in French: pomme de terre). Dates were finger apples. The banana was, in Middle English, the apple of paradise.

Tom Peters instructs in his customary bravado to "create your own microequivalent of the Nike swoosh.