Quotes About Allegory

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

What I like best is a good story with a moral.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.

One reason we misunderstand allegory is that we moderns think that reading is a matter of garnering information. For ancient Christians, reading scripture is a matter of being changed from one degree of glory to another, of being transformed (2 Cor. 3:18).

Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious).

The columns of the Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts, the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously

En un muro blanco dibujas las alegorías del reposo, y es siempre una reina loca que yace bajo la luna sobre la triste hierba del viejo jardín.

Jesus walking on water is an allegory, not fluid mechanics. God destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah is a warning, not a historical battle. Doubting Thomas is an example, not a person. The story of Noah, with all of its scientific and historical impossibilities, can be read the same way.

It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.

To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The book of Revelation is written largely in symbols.

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

The Sun is bad enough even while he is single, drying up our marshes with his heat as he does. But what will become of us if he marries and and begets other suns?

The brass means, "Not I," and the lily means, "But Christ.

I woke up, smiling to myself at this dream with its allegorical aspects but with no real meaning.

Essa iconoclastia ainda espreita em toda parte, e o diabo é o literalismo. Quando tomamos as coisas literalmente, aniquilamos o poder dos símbolos de nos fazer percorrer os vários níveis de entendimento.

A naked lunch is natural to us, we eat reality sandwiches But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.