Quotes About Symbols

We are living in what the Greeks called the ????óÏ' (Kairos) – the right time – for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.' C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958)

Everything is an energy, numbers and symbols included.

Our scars are a witness to the world. They are apart of our story. Healed wounds that are symbols that God has restored us.

...Surely, we must renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

I actually share her view and understand her frustration when any government attempts to ban secular symbols like Santa Claus or Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer or Christmas lights.

Seems hats have been on topOf all the stages comings and goingsHelping us remember heroes and idols

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes.

I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

absoluteness is a quality of the transcendent that comes to expression in revelation, but not necessarily of the symbols, myths, propositions or doctrines formulated to represent or communicate it. . . . the most precious thing we have to offer each other in interfaith encounters is our honest, unexaggerated and nonpossessive sharing of what we take to be the moments of absoluteness in the particuilar faith traditions in which we live as committed participants.

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

Words are not the highest reality, nor' what is expressed in words the highest reality. Why? Because the highest reality is an experience which cannot be entered into by means of statements' regarding it. Poetry and visual symbols come much closer to reality. The mind must be in a state of wisdom to understand wisdom.

God will stop at nothing to get through to us, overwhelming us with symbols, piling them up one on another without carefully codifying whether and how they all make sense. One thing they are not is tragically empty, distant, cold. They are humming, hot-blooded, and full of life.

Being congenitally unable to function unless he had some symbols of evil to attack, Roosevelt looked about him for an opponent. As usual he selected the biggest and nearest. "I think I shall move against Byrnes at once," he told Lodge on 18 May. "I thoroughly distrust him, and cannot do any thorough work while he remains.49

Superstitions and eccentric habits are a Western substitute for actual idols.

All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it: everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of all the illuminati, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe it their Secrets and Symbols.

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

If we speak plainly, without metaphors or symbols, we cannot escape common sense. Metaphors and symbols can be abused.

When you think about musicians who are reading music, my contention has always been the energy that you're using deciphering what the symbol is is taking away from the maximum creative energy that you might have had if you understood that it's but a symbol.

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

If all things were made through Him, clearly so must the splendid revelations have been which were made to the fathers and prophets, and became to them the symbols of the sacred mysteries of religion.

My position has always been that the way people age and the signs that we show of aging is nature's way of tattooing. It's natural scarification, and the life you lead gives you the symbols and the emblems of your life, the road map you followed.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.