Quotes About Symbolism

The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred.

The highlight is on Saturday, when the thousands gather to watch a bonfire consume the Burning Man, a ten-story-high wooden effigy packed with gasoline.

Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.

New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.

America First," a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

She had drawn circles around her eyes, which were joined by a line across the bridge of her nose. It was a traditional mark of her calling, but no one knew why.

Sánchez Mazas) "...sino también hallar un condolieron renacentista cuya figura llegada el momento, catolizase simbólicamente todas las energías liberada por el pánico que la descomposición de la Monarquía y el triunfo inevitable de la "República iban a generar entre los sectores más tradicionales de la sociedad española...

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

Mass(age) is the message.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.

What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced

The West, having destroyed its own values, finds itself back at the zero degree of symbolic power, and in a turnabout, it wants to impose the zero degree on everyone. It challenges the rest of the world to annihilate itself symbolically as well. It demands that the rest of the world enter into its game, participate in the generalised, planetary exchange and fall into its trap…There is a moral and philosophical confrontation, almost a metaphysical one, beyond Good and Evil.

meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs

The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight

Might one suggest to the people that they storm the opera house and tear it down on the symbolic date of 14 July? Might one suggest that they parade the bloody heads of our modern cultural governors on the end of pikestaffs? But we no longer make history. We have become reconciled with it and protect it like an endangered masterpiece. Times have changed.

That everything exceptional is doomed to be destroyed derives from the symbolic rule that no player must be bigger than the game itself.

He does not define concepts, he does not analyse them, he does not criticize them: he murders them (but the crime is never perfect).

Si le feu brûlait ma maison, qu'emporterais-je? J'aimerais emporter le feu...

Elisabeth would slip a coat on over her nightdress and sink down in a dream, one elbow on the table, her hand propping her cheek, in a pose reminiscent of some allegorical female figure, symbolizing Science, or Agriculture, or the Seasons. Paul lolled beside her, sketchily attired. They ate silently, like strolling players taking a rest between performances.

Et qui refuserait au Phénix une bûche Pour le naïf espoir de renaître avec lui ? (Phénixologie)

The sun's last finger let go of the pine up there. The sun fell behind the hills. A few drops of blood splashed the sky. Night washed them out with her grey hand.

We sat under the mango tree and I was holding his hand when he began to cry. Drops fell on my hand like the water from the dripstone in the filter in our yard. Then I began to cry too and when I felt my own tears on my hand I thought, 'Now perhaps we're married. 'Yes, certainly, now we're married,' I thought.

In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.' Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest. Feel for yourself.