Quotes About Symbolism

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon. —Plato, The Symposium

Chinese alchemy parallels European alchemy in postulating the change from watery lead (nigredo) to fiery heart (rubedo) and then to pure white (albedo) or gold (also known as the Philosopher's Stone).22 Understandably, in ancient Greece, a "similar archetypal concept of a perfect being is that of Platonic man, round on all sides and uniting within himself the two sexes."23

The Chinese represent crisis with two pictographs: danger and opportunity. The

SS uniform was black and elegant

There is symbolism here. When we ignore God or cast Him out of our lives, spiritual darkness fills in where His light was. This darkness can be felt. In fact, no doubt you have literally "felt" evil, when you have approached it, considering participating in it, or while it was being practiced by others, or when approached by individuals and groups engaged in gross evil.

Bram Stoker, working in a largely intuitive manner, and no doubt propelled by more than a few personal demons, managed to tap a well of archetypal motifs so deep and persistent that they can assume the shape of almost any critical container.

For him, poetry was an inverted form of sympathetic magic: what it tries to preserve disappears, — David Jauss, from section 6 of "The Wandering Between Worlds," Black Warrior Review (vol. 23, no. 1, Fall/Winter 1996)

Gunnar Ekelöf's poem "Waterlilies

Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, so he felt ulfire to be wild and painful, and jale dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous.

The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

The Goddess is not just the female version of God. She represents a different concept.

If God is male, then the male is God.

All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

God is worshipped only inpictures, images, idols.

The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle produces an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.

As a toy fruit or a toy elephant reminds one of the real fruit and the living animal, so do the images that are worshipped remind one of the God who is formless and eternal.

The soul ... may have many symbols with which it reaches toward God.

I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.

The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.

God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.

Dog is God spelled backward.

The two stallions, the silver and the black, represent the equine god (whomsoever horses pray to) in this ritual so ancient that no one knows what god to thank.