Quotes About Symbols

What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines? So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply They are merely conventional signs!

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - to turn the choad of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies- all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand incommunicable.

What's lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what's a crusade? Something you make out of crosses—a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols.

The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

A man consists of what I may call an Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal sub-subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

Simboliai ir be spalv? atlieka savo darb?

Arta, presupun, r?mâne apanajul exclusiv al încep?torilor ori al celor hot?râÈ›i s? nu mai ias? din impas, mulÈ›umindu-se cu surogatul Realit??ii Absolute, cu simboluri, în loc de ceea ce semnific?, È™i cu reÈ›ete elegant compuse, în locul dineului propriu-zis.

The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience. To

Sometimes," Vijaya agreed, "even more. For the simple reason that a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.

W]hen Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a 'revolutionary religion,' and [...] when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture are but symbols, it becomes politically 'static' and 'reactionary.

This suffocating interior of a dime-store shop was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe....What it had allowed me to perceive inside was not the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of symbols - in other words, a homemade substitute for Suchness.

Look not so deeply into words and letters; for this Mystery hath been hidden by the Alchemists. Compose the sevenfold into a fourfold regimen; and when thou hast understood thou mayest make symbols; but by playing child's games with symbols thou shalt never understand.

We are surrounded by symbols and take them for granted. They had to start somewhere, though, and gained their meaning because of historical use, which is suggestive for fiction writers. Anything can be turned into a symbol.

The only possible demand at the endpoint of deconstruction is to deconstruct some more. And it seems possible to pull apart and find cause for resentment endlessly. Certainly, that is the hope of the deconstructionists, who now scour the world of art and look for symbols of rape, male dominance, privilege, racism, and much more.10 And of course they find things to occupy their time.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition

When I was on a book tour last year, I saw a sign in a bookstore in a seaside town in Maine that was carefully drawn with popular symbols of coastal living and these words were entwined: Hope anchors the soul. From that childhood that many might call "disadvantaged," I was anchored in the belief that most things are possible.

They have bedsheet banners in Atlanta too. They say REBEL. Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn't they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old.

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

This new information world also provides a new set of tools and tactics that another generation of clercs can use to reach people who want simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. There is no need, nowadays, to form a street movement in order to appeal to those of an authoritarian predisposition. You can construct one in an office