Quotes About Symbolism

That the highest summit of life can be expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact, for any growing beyond oneself means death.

What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth.

Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: "Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.

Here is the dwelling of night; whereas the lobby stood for the daylight world and its superficiality.

What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us.

Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is the expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance

As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

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.

In our Western civilization the Cosmic Man has been identified to a great extent with Christ, and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha. In the Old Testament this same symbolic figure turns up as the "Son of Man" and in later Jewish mysticism is called Adam Kadmon. Certain religious movements of late antiquity simply called him Anthropos (the Greek word for man). Like all symbols this image points to an unknowable secret—to the ultimate unknown meaning of human existence.

Para Jung, el yoga representaba un rico almacén de descripciones simbólicas de la experiencia interna y, en particular, del proceso de individuación. Sostenía que «se han observado destacados paralelismos con el yoga (por parte de la psicología analítica) especialmente con el yoga Kundalini y el simbolismo del yoga tántrico, el lamaísmo y el yoga taoísta en China.

Les rêves sont des compensations de l'attitude consciente. (p. 220)

up' is from when a bird has eaten too much of his kill and doesn't want to hunt or do anything for a while," she said. "And 'under my thumb' and 'wrapped around his little finger' are from holding a falcon tight to your fist by its jesses so it can't fly. Those terms were in Shakespeare's plays and until then they weren't common usage.

This fashion for symbolic designs that people have to puzzle out, it tires me. There are enough real mysteries in the world.' 'But you paint, sir.' 'If ever I find time I do. But I try in my poor way to show people directly and clearly, like Master Holbein. Art should resolve the mysteries of our being, not occlude them further.

esvástica se recortaba aún visible sobre el fondo rojo y

Does everything always have to mean something else?" I ask before we get started. Who knew that literature was so tangled and complicated? "That is a wonderful lesson, Sang Ly. Remember it." "What was it again?" I ask, not certain to what she was referring. She repeats it for me. "In literature, everything means something.

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.

Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin.

Luna is really the mother of the Sun, which means, psychologically, that the unconscious is pregnant with consciousness and gives birth to it.

When religion stops talking about animals it will be all downhill.

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.

There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.