Quotes About Symbolism

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. – Song of Solomon 2:1

In Revelation, John frequently used the number seven, indicating completion or perfection.

Jesus] walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands. – Revelation 2:1

The twelve gates were twelve pearls . . . and the street of the city was pure gold. – Revelation 21:21

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Eve was formed from out of his opened side, is an emblem of Christ's death,

Works of architecture were, in that context, embodiments of the ideals on which the life of institutions depended.

storytelling is a ritual surrounding a metaphor for life.

Story is metaphor for life.

Plot these days is anti-intellectual and verboten, the mark of the Philistine, the huckster with a pen. There mustn't be too much story and that should be fog-bound and shrouded in heavy symbolism, including the phallic, like a sort of covoluted charade. Symbolism now carries the day, it's the one true ladder of literary heaven.

On 23 August, small live fish were thrown on to the fire pro se ('to redeem oneself or 'for one's well-being') wrote Varro (LL, 6, 20), 'in place of human souls' says Festus more precisely (p. 276

The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he -- because he usually doesn't know any Greek -- can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination.

By the mid to late fourth century, a cross surmounted by a christogram began to signify Christ's conquest of death, a triumph that would be ultimately shared by his faithful followers. Before long, the christogram was a popular decoration for a Christian tomb, supplanting the praying figure and the dove as a symbol of hope.1 In time, the christogram itself was displaced as the cross emerged to become the primary symbol of the Christian faith.

What Constantine ordered, however, was not a cross-shaped object but rather a long, gilded spear, bisected by a horizontal bar, topped with a golden and gemmed wreath that surrounded two letters, chi and rho: the first two letters of Christos. Like Lactantius, Eusebius explains that this looked like the intersection of the Latin letters X and P. In addition, a banner hung from the bar, embroidered with portraits of the emperor with his two sons.

Showing Christ as African, Asian, or Central American underlines the universality of his humanity. The depiction of the Holy Spirit as a hummingbird rather than a dove on the Mexican cruz de ánimas (Fig. 9.2) is a modest but striking instance of using meaningful visual language for a particular culture.

there were no bones in his body, only tunes, and no blood, but poetry.

One burns the dead while the other burns the living.

I don't believe in Our Dark Lord of the Underworld or the rising of the Antichrist, I don't believe in child sacrifice or wild midnight blood rituals, and I don't believe that I can call on the power of Satan to knock some cheerleader off her pyramid. Wearing black felt safe. Wearing it on my skin, the mark of something vicious, that felt right.

The dancers march about and twirl their scarves as if Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will had been gotten pregnant by Busby Berkeley.

The lives of the poor are rich in symbols.

Daddy used to say a common crow's droppings brought uncommon good luck.

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...