Quotes About Symbols

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients.

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.

This is not an ideological book except insofar as argument for change, rather than for the status quo, can be called an ideology; different people, in different places, in different situations and different times will construct their own solutions and symbols of salvation for those times.

Our symbols aren't supposed to matter, but that's wishful thinking—symbols always matter.

Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.

Symbols shmimbols. Sure they're important but... Well look at Ahab's whale. Now there's a great symbol. Some say it stands for god, meaning, and purpose. Others say it stands for purposelessness and the void. But what we sometimes forget is that Ahab's whale was also just a whale.

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit.

All great works of literature contain variations and combinations, overt or implied, of such archetypal conflicts inherent in the condition of man, which first occur in the symbols of mythology, and are restated in the particular idiom of each culture and period.

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

Symbols are more than the basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce, "to do away with," in Leakey and Lewin's remarkable phrase, "the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another.

Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe -- dare I dream it? -- maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.

In Freud's theory, the wish-producing, fear-generating power of these body parts lies within them, not, with their strategic position within a historically specific, male-dominant, phallus-favoring, social organization of powers, bodies, and symbols.

One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says "All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children" (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal education.

La testarudez es el puente gracias al cual los idiotas pasan a la Historia transformados en héroes, en símbolos o en genios.

Britain continued to use the terms and the symbols of its religion and would never make a vulgar Gallic show of executing clerics, but it would reject real religion nonetheless.

When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place. Like the Christian ecclesia, the inner-worldly community has its apocalypse too; yet the new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific judgements.

Men can let the contents of the world grow to such an extent that the world and God disappear behind them, but they cannot annul the human condition itself. This remains alive in each individual soul; and when God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.

Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself -- Reality. One must be satisfied with symbols.

But last and least known is its additional purpose as a Kabbalistic meditational device that thus, in one more way, links it to ancient Jewish sources. Within it is a wide array of mystical symbols: spheres of the Tree of Life, the pathways of the soul, the four layers of the universe, and the triangles of Philo of Alexandria.

Diphthongs are indicated by combinations of hooks and circles.

Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.

We're in the hands of real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols. with the right symbols, with the right questions. they can lead you into initiating yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself… ~Robert Bauval