Quotes About Symbols

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

The association of magic and cryptology was reinforced by other factors. Mysterious symbols were used in such esoteric fields as astrology and alchemy—where each planet and chemical had a special sign, like the circle and arrow for Mars—just as they were in cryptology. Like words in cipher, spells and incantations, such as "abracadabra," looked like nonsense but in reality were potent with hidden meanings.

In these symbols Christ is exhibited as a sacrifice; and expiation is needed only where there is no merit -- where there is positive demerit -- where the individual atoned for has become obnoxious to justice, and must depend for salvation on other righteousness than his own. -- David King, The Lord's Supper

On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as "bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.

Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.

Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn't rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship.

Armies of marching men told of that blight of nations old or young—war. These, and birds unnamable, and beasts unclassable, with dots and marks and hieroglyphics, recorded the history of a bygone people. Symbols they were of an era that had gone into the dim past, leaving only these marks, {Symbols recording the history of a bygone people.} forever unintelligible; yet while they stood, century after century, ineffaceable, reminders of the glory, the mystery, the sadness of life.

People value monuments above men, and signs above works.

He had found out that no man may make another free. Freedom was something internal. The outside signs were just signs and symbols of the man inside. All you could do was to give the opportunity for freedom and the man himself must make his own emancipation.

Fairyland is the place where what we look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur

All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

The main thing wrong with religion is that people have gotten it wrong. The goal is to understand religion as it should be understood, as traditions, myths, symbols, and practices intended to lead one to a deeper, more profound experience of human life. The desire for this knowledge is hard wired in us. That won't disappear. Unless of course we wipe each other out in the next holy war, in which case we've successfully screwed ourselves.

In this dream she dreamed the sixteen-o'clock dream once more, but in this heightened state of awareness all those images and symbols that had so far evaded her now came flocking to her fingers like singing birds, and they lifted her, by her fingertips, and she flew with them.

A man without tattoos is invisible to the Gods.

Wealth, status, and power have become in our culture all too powerful symbols of happiness. ... And we assume that if only we could acquire some of those same symbols, we would be nuch happier.

words were like magic, like ancient runes, symbols, that, if you knew how to unlock and decode them, conjured stories—people and pictures in your mind.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.

Non ci sono demoni ma una serie di archetipi comuni a ogni civiltà.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

There was enough reason for it too, as the whole of France was shaken. Certainly in our eyes the election and its results and its representatives are only symbols. But what it proves once more is that worldly ambition and fame pass away, but the human heart beats the same to this day, in as perfect sympathy with the past of our buried forefathers as with the generation to come.

I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's work) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

The numerals of Pythagoras," says Porphyry, who lived about 300 A.D, "were hieroglyphic symbols, by means whereof he explained all ideas concerning the nature of things," and the same method of explaining the secrets of nature is once again being insisted upon in the new revelation of the "Secret Doctrine," by H. P. Blavatsky.

I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician, and the artist.

Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.