Quotes About Symbolism

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

The AlphabetOf flowers.

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

MARK but this flea

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, a dialogue ensues in the middle of a battlefield, symbolizing the battlefield of life which we are fighting through our illusions.

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

In art, a dress is never just a dress; nor in life either.

I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I've been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage.

Clearly, America has no shortage of metaphorical opportunities for the poor.

Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

I so connected to symbolically being able to turn lead into gold. My grandmother used to say, "Life give you a lemon, you go ahead and make lemonade." To me, that's alchemy.

Images adorn our inner life and carry great power there.

What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.

I sometimes think that never blows so redThe Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;That every Hyacinth the Garden wearsDropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.

I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, "This must thou eat." And I ate the world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Lipsticks by Elaine Equi The Best American Poetry Red Wheelbarrow I Have Eaten the Plums Poppies in October Pink Christmas Red Weather A Rose Is a Rose Jaffa Juice Watermelon Sugar Frost at Midnight

anthropologists speak of ritual leadership and ritual space.

Every saint has a bee in his halo.

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.