Quotes About Symbolism

It's comforting to me," he added, "that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.

At the baptismal ceremony the child was, therefore, exorcised (with the obvious implication that it had previously been possessed by the Devil), anointed with chrism (consecrated oil and balsam) and signed with the cross in holy water. Around its head was bound a white cloth (chrisom), in which it would be buried if it should die in infancy.

Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of.

has been speculated that the scapegoat represents Jesus taking away our sin. That is one possible interpretation. If the information given in the Mishnah is correct, another picture emerges. Two identical goats, one dedicated to God, the other dedicated to Satan.

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.

The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water.

a myth is the matrix that is transformed from culture to culture, but basically remains essentially the same.

The quickest way to demonstrate the sheer symbolicity of the negative is to look at any object, say, a table, and to remind yourself that, though it is exactly what it is, you could go on for the rest of your life saying all the things that it is not. "It is not a book, it is not a house, it is not Times Square," etc., etc.

Proverbs 16:31 says, "The silver-haired head is a crown of glory, if it is found in the way of righteousness," and Proverbs 20:29 adds, "The splendor of old men is their gray head." Unfortunately, in today's world, white hair represents feeble health and declining strength. But not so with God. It is an emblem of wisdom, glory, and antiquity, and it will be a crown of glory to those who follow Christ.

But metaphor, however poetic, never slaked a dry throat.

They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.

Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.

There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: "You ought", or: "This is the truth." It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it;

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end, but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different; to understand it you must examine it from every aspect-just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape.

Often in the case of these sudden transformations one can prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skilfully arranging circumstances that will unavoidably lead to a crisis.

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. But this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance: Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams.

Dreams are, after all, compensations for the conscious attitude.

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.

A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form.

Those who do not realize the special feeling tone of the archetype end with nothing more than a jumble of mythological concepts, which can be strung together to show that everything means anything—or nothing at all. All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not. Archetypes come to life only when one patiently tries to discover why and in what fashion they are meaningful to a living individual.