Quotes About Symbols

Human cultures construct an enormous variety of environments through language, technology, and institutions. We are born in and die in these systems of symbols and imagination.

Symbols A storm-beaten old watch-tower, A blind hermit rings the hour. All-destroying sword-blade still Carried by the wandering fool. Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade, Beauty and fool together laid.

Writing is a method for storing information through material signs.

I was thinking of Hecate at the crossroads with her burning torches and keys, Medusa with her snakes and fatal gaze, Artemis with her hunting dogs and deer, Aphrodite with her doves, Demeter with her mares, Athena with her owl. Whenever I saw eccentric and sometimes mentally fragile older women feeding pigeons on the pavement of every city in the world, I thought, Yes, there she is, she is one of those cut-down goddesses who has become demented by life.

You cannot be human without the ability to make symbols and recognize what they mean. A red stop sign is a symbol that tells cars to halt at an intersection. Red has zero connection to stop until human beings assign it that meaning.

Love: a hybrid emotion made up of various other emotions collaged by some weak individual's mind to try to quell a particular horror that's not been wiped out by more standardized symbols like Christ, etc. Nietzsche, right? Whatever.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

That day he was looking at one that didn't seem to be written in their language. It was filled with symbols and drawings of trolls. She longed to know what her father was studying, but didn't ask.

Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.

By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time." (p. 212)

Visual journals are created in a secret language of symbols. Intentional or not, they are private maps only their makers can follow.

In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols.

For some reason, it takes my brain a moment to process…the open-close symbols on elevators, which is which.

But Hector had his zoot suits, and Joey had his crosses, and Nate had the six-pointed star he wore under his shirt with his dog tags on every mission.

They tied them up and forced them to watch as each was ultimately stabbed repeatedly or shot, the last victim, according to the police, being Cici Riorden, Paul's new, young wife, and left cryptic symbols carved into their victims' bodies.

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

No power is made available by ignoring images and symbols. There is no possible reversal to this law.

A man's ring of heavy gold floated above Nynaeve's head, and above Elayne's, a red-hot iron and an axe.

I got out my jar of ointment. I knew animators who had special containers for the ointment. Crockery, hand-blown glass, mystical symbols carved into the sides. I used an old Mason jar that had once held Grandma Blake's green beans. Larry fished out a peanut butter jar with the label still on it. Extra-crunchy. Yum-Yum.

Words divide, pictures unite.

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness

The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.

Any society which suppresses the heritage of its conquered minorities, prevents their history or denies them their symbols, has sown the seeds of their own destruction.