Quotes About Symbols

Countless gods filled countless gaps," Langdon said. "And yet, over the centuries, scientific knowledge increased." A collage of mathematical and technical symbols flooded the sky overhead. "As the gaps in our understanding of the natural world gradually disappeared, our pantheon of gods began to shrink.

cetera. The symbols of death inspire Masons to ponder how better to lead their lives while on this earth.

The other difference between codes and patterns," Langdon continued, "is that codes do not occur naturally in the world. Musical notation does not sprout from trees, and symbols do not draw themselves in the sand. Codes are the deliberate inventions of intelligent consciousnesses.

The neocortex is the seat of thought; it contains the centers that put together and comprehend what the senses perceive. It adds to a feeling what we think about it—and allows us to have feelings about ideas, art, symbols, imaginings

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.

The earliest impressions are pictographic in form - little pictures that are the stylized versions of the things they represent. And most things they represent are plants and animals. The earliest writing deprived from vision rather than sound.

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.

Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

But this metaphysics, like this science, has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue of symbols, forgetting something that, while science needs symbols for its analytical development, the main object of metaphysics is to do away with symbols.

A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the nation that sets it forth.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

"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!"

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

I believe the reason we sleep is not just to allow our body to rest but that it is to allow this inner wisdom to speak to us through symbols. This includes the body or somatic problems as well as psychological ones. Dreams and drawings are useful in diagnosing physical conditions.

The best leaders... almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.

Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities. Nevertheless

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

legends, which in the etymological sense are what one should pass on, are only the symbols of a tradional truth transported from one generation to the next.

A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we'd die of heartbreak.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

These pillars, known as Boaz, the pillar of strength, and Jachin, the pillar of wisdom, are normally found side by side in any masonic temple where they are the two basic symbols of craftmasonry.

The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.