Quotes About Symbolism

Recuerdo haber visto, en imágenes de archivo, a cerdos paseándose por la Biblioteca Nacional de Phnom Penh, vaciada por los jemeres rojos. Derribaban sillas y pisoteaban mondaduras. Los cerdos sustituían a los libros. Y nosotros sustituíamos a los cerdos.

The bodhi tree has been converted into a marriage tree. The belief is that young women who die before marriage should have a husband in the next world. Their relatives bring a wedding dress and monks to this tree and perform a wedding ceremony. The spirit of the dead woman is married to a famous singer, poet or magician who died many years ago. Their families believe that he'll be a good husband will look after each wife as if she were the only one.

The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose.

Bees are a good omen to Kings, for they signify an obsequious people.

A Bat meeting any one running away, signifies an evasion: for although she have no wings, yet she flies.

Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.

These dead were in some regards the antithesis of the Republican disappeared in that their deaths were, from the start, supercharged with state symbolism and the disinterred bodies of many of them (such as those at Paracuellos, but there are many other examples) were made highly visible in the 1940s as part of a ceremonial process of state "sanctification".

the law seeks, as it were, an end in symbolism, but does not offer any means of allowing citizens to address what was actually done to whom, by whom and why.

Each little flower has a history and cultural references, is a superstition or a cure for something.

Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn.

It seemed that every time Miranda looked at Eliot he had some of that bread in his mouth—with Luc's champagne marmalade, or mackerel, or honey, or butter.

The Yeltsin years considerably lowered the bar [of public expectations] for the country's next leader: Putin's specific policies and actions arguably matter far less than his reassuring symbolic function as "a real man" who can husband the nation's resources and promise a return to greatness. (2007: 227)

And I too am not myself, hoping for refuge in a metaphor that will contain it all.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear, black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, and chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.

Ibn Arabi was above all the disciple of Khidr ( Khidr). We shall attempt further on to indicate what it signifies and implies to be "the disciple of Khidr." In any event such a relationship with a hidden spiritual master lends the disciple an essentially "transhistorical" dimension and presupposes an ability to experience events which are enacted in a reality other than the physical reality of daily life, events which spontaneously transmute themselves into symbols.

How should the first two chapters of the book of Genesis be understood in their internal, that is, spiritual, sense? It must be done by applying what the Christian world has so utterly forgotten: that everything in the Word, to the smallest detail, envelops and signifies spiritual and celestial things.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

If an eagle be imprisoned on the back of a coin, and the coin tossed into the sky, the coin will spin, the coin will flutter, but the eagle will never fly.

The style of bathing suit we now know as the bikini existed before then, but got its name only when the designer Louis Réard chose to use it to draw attention to a collection he was showing a few days after the bomb test. Bikini, we might argue, should have become a word to sum up the devastation that a nuclear weapon can cause; instead it became a word for a skimpy piece of beach attire. One

I mean, I do wear a wedding ring and take it off when I shoot.

Vereker's secret… the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor's return gifts.

even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.