Quotes About Symbolism

I thought Alchemists avoided alcohol the same way they do primary colors.

The book was The Count of Monte Cristo. I held it up, needing to make a joke, needing to do anything to make this less real. "I saw the movie. Your subtle symbolism isn't really all that subtle. Unless you've hidden a file inside it." "The book's always better than the movie.

A dream doesn't mean anything. I dreamed the other night that I went riding on a dinosaur.

High heels were invented by a woman who had once been kissed on the forehead.

In the little patch of concrete by the front porch were the two pennies stuck in there when Leroy and I started first grade. "Long as we got those two cents," Carrie would say, "we ain't broke.

Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

Butterflies are not insects,' Captain John Sterling said soberly. 'They are self-propelled flowers.

If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight—and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?

Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation for each symbol.

These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not money; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more than water shared was growing-closer. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old-One's thoughts--money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.

Magic," I stated, "is a symbol for any process not understood.

Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.

Once we become sensitive to dreams, we discover that every dynamic in a dream is manifesting itself in some way in our practical lives

The Hebrew imagination, we might note, was unabashedly anthropomorphic but by no means foolishly literalist.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions.

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

Furthermore, what you can say about what you saw depends on the structure of your symbolism — whether you describe it in English, Persian, Chinese, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, differential calculus or quaternions. This explains why, in Dr. Jones's words, whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.

And with symbolism we can create meaningless metaphysics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on medicating us. With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable.

Even more astounding, this Miracle can only happen if the priest has a Willy. Protestants, Jews, Zen Buddhists etc., have ordained many female clergy-persons in recent decades, but the Vatican remains firm in the principle that only a male — a human with a Willy — can transform the essence of bread into the essence of a dead body.

Milton said once, poetically, that whoever murders a book, murders a man. Psychologists would mostly agree that that is symbolically true. Destroying a book, like the psychotic behavior of slashing a photograph, expresses rage at the person who wrote the book or the person in the photo. One cannot help wondering, at this point, about those who burned the books of Dr. Reich or conspired to suppress the books of Dr. Velikovsky.

As we mentioned earlier, knowledge of cannabis goes back to at least the New Stone Age, when our ancestors in the Near East buried their dead with specimens of marijuana – perhaps to keep them happy on the voyage to the "other side," or perhaps to bargain with the denizens upon their arrival. This shows the same religious awe for this plant that, according to U.S. government officials, was only invented in the 1960s as an excuse to smoke it.

Circles of this sort, called mandalas, are widely used for meditation in the Buddhist tradition. Often they are cornered by four demons who evidently, like the Occidental lion, bull, angel and eagle, represent the extremes to be avoided.

It is possible, and even probable, that nymphs and satyrs and such are only gods who have been apprehended without love-partially, obscurely, distortedly.