Quotes About Symbols

We] cannot and should not expect to rediscover the full body of ancient wisdom by studying dusty monuments and myths full of idioms and subtle references understood only by those who lived at the time. The perennial wisdom requires each individual and age to discover it anew in external mathematics, expressing it in ways and symbols suitable for those times and cultures.

need it though, desperately. More of the web unraveling from my face… I see more and more. Symbols are placed in my path, my lucky number 22 keeps on appearing before me, letting me know that I am on my own road. Call it romantic, call me 'crazy'…but here it appears almost every hour?—?on a clock, a license plate, in phone numbers, on cash registers, out of people's mouths.

When the history of the earth enters a very critical period, as at present, the myths, gods and demons that direct us, the Archetypes, come to take an even more active part, becoming almost visible to many. They participate directly in the combat, as happened in the last world war, of cosmic resonance.... When the mythic slain SS were not destroying men, they were their immortal Gods in combat against other Entities, or Daemons. They were symbols against symbols.

The immortals do not die, even when they do die. Men come to be symbols, pieces in the great game.

But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent.

what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don't have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won't end up being any good.

C?tre sfârÈ™itul nopÈ›ii sensul c?rÈ›ilor se evapora complet È™i r?mâneam în braÈ›e cu paginile lor poroase, cu semnele lor cabalistice imposibil de înÈ›eles, cu parfumul de hârtie pr?fuit?, cel mai excitant parfum de pe p?mânt.

The women say that they perceive their bodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favour any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden object. They say that they do not want to become prisoners of their own ideology. They say that they did not garner and develop the symbols that were necessary to them at an earlier period to demonstrate their strength.

Never forget, the words are not the reality, only reality is reality; picture symbols are the idea, words are confusion.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people's religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.

The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.

By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

Words, says Freud, are a halfway house to lost things; and words are only one class of the sets of symbols that make up human culture. "If we could not have schizophrenics we also could not have cultures," says LaBarre.21 Freud's analysis of word-consciousness deepens our understanding not only of language as neurosis, but also of culture as neurosis and of culture as a "substitute-gratification," a provisional arrangement in the quest for real enjoyment.

God's love for humanity wraps the spiritual in the perceptible, the superessential in the essence. It gives form … to what is formless and, through a variety of symbols, it multiplies and shapes Simplicity that has no shape. Dionysius the Areopagite Divine Names, I, 4

Many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it aright. More often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it, we despair because our lives seem meaningless. The secret of a great life is often a man's success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them and so learning to walk in the true path.

Narratives are subjective and selective. They frame and filter concepts, images, and information according to desirable beliefs, values, symbols, traditions, and preferences. They are motivational tools that reinforce existing social identities and uniqueness. They arouse deep passions and allegiance.

isn't it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language---the ability to experience the world through symbols---is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn't it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and body are one.

Symbols are not lies; symbols contain truth. Allegories and parables are not falsehoods; they convey information: moreover, they can be understood by those who are not as yet prepared to receive the plain truth.

I liked being adrift in symbols, beauty for beauty's sake.

Anyone who can control a major television channel can use it to pour out propaganda, but it is only this new generation which does not know how to resist it, provided it uses the right sort of codes, language and symbols. None of these codes, languages or symbols are conservative, or can be used by a conservative, because they are 'subversive' of the imagined 'authority' of a mythical 'establishment', which of course includes the Tories

Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me as signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD of Hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion.