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Symbol Quotes

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Symbol Quotes

“What if it becomes less about how we look and more about how much we care? What if it becomes less about how much money we earn and more about how much we share our good fortune? Imagine a world where who we are in our hearts is the ultimate status symbol.”

“Luke tells us that Jesus cast the devil out of a boy who repeatedly threw himself into fire and water to destroy himself. Of all the unfortunates in the New Testament we are, perhaps, least likely to see ourselves in this boy. Yet he is the best symbol for us: we too continually plunge ourselves into all sorts of nonsense and engage in a diversity of dangerous and self-destructive beliefs and practices. This unfortunate is Everyman. He shows us truth: of our selves we are lost—Jesus only can save us.”

“A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" )”

“I use the chopsticks to outline the biggest heart possible. Then I use the Sweet'N Low packets to fill it in. I borrow some from two other tables when I run out. When I'm done, I point to the heart on the table. "This," I say, "is only about one ninety-millionth of how I feel about you." She laughs. "I'll try not to take it personally," she says. "Take what personally?" I say. "You should take it very personally." "The fact that you used artificial sweetener?" I take a Sweet'N Low and fling it at her. "Not everything is a symbol!" I shout.”

“There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of progress. One class lives to the utility of the symbol, as the majority of men do, regarding health and wealth as the chief good. Another class live about this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet and artist and the sensual school in philosophy. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified and these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third spiritual perception. I see in society the neophytes of all these classes, the class especially of young men who in their best knowledge of the sign have a misgiving that there is yet an unattained substance and they grope and sigh and aspire long in dissatisfaction, the sand-blind adorers of the symbol meantime chirping and scoffing and trampling them down. I see moreover that the perfect man - one to a millennium - if so many, traverses the whole scale and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty; and lastly wears it lightly as a robe which he can easily throw off, for he sees the reality and divine splendor of the inmost nature bursting through each chink and cranny.”

“Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb.”

“I catch sight of Luis with one of my bandannas on his head and my gut tightens. I yank it off him. "Don't ever touch this, Luis." "Why not?" he asks, his deep brown eyes all innocent. To Luis, it's a bandanna. To me, it's a symbol of what is and will never be. How the hell am I supposed to explain it to an eleven-year-old kid? He knows what I am. It's no secret the bandanna has the Latino Blood colors on it. Payback and revenge got me in and now there's no way out. But I'll die before I let one of my brothers get sucked in. I ball the bandanna in my fist. "Luis, don't touch my shit. Especially my Blood stuff." "I like red and black." That's the last thing I need to hear. "If I ever catch you wearin' it again, you'll be sportin' black and blue," I tell him. "Got it, little brother?" He shrugs. "Yeah. I got it.”

“The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle's-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt's Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The 'Orient' figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of 'instantaneous electric connection' where 'mythical and symbolic thinking.' which once formed 'spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,' would no longer be needed.”

“Here is another way of putting an aspect of that same parallel: just as The Critique of Pure Reason seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of an object presuppose a form of synthesis that belongs to the understanding, so, too, the Tractatus seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of the identity of a sign presupposes linguistic self-consciousness of the logical nexus of the symbol. Just as Kant seeks to show how, on the one hand, the understanding must bear on sensibility in order to have content (for it to represent anything), and how, on the other, the sensible manifold requires conferral of unity through the activity of the understanding to be more than merely blind (for it to amount to more than mere sensory noise); so, too, later Wittgenstein aims to show how, on the one hand, the symbol must find expression in the sign to be more than nothing (for it to say anything), and how, on the other, the form of the sign (in spoken language—its phonological form) presupposes the apprehension of its real possibilities for symbolizing (its logico-grammatical uses in acts of speech) in order for it to come into view as having the form that it does.”

“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to somehow stand in for all the things I didn't have in life that were thought to make us human, all the absent music and touch and sympathy; in my mind she lived a separate life apart from her real one, and there she grew more pure and perfect with each passing day . . . In my mind Miranda had become a miracle.”

“Schimbarea este iminentă. Ființa omenească se află în pragul unei noi ere, când își va întoarce iar privirile spre natură și spre ceea ce a fost... spre ideile din cărți precum Zoharul și alte texte străvechi din lumea întreagă. Adevărurile semnificative își au propria forță gravitațională și, în cele din urmă, atrag oamenii spre ele. Va veni o zi în care știința modernă va începe să studieze cu atenție înțelepciunea anticilor. Aceea va fi ziua în care omenirea va începe să afle răspunsurile la marile întrebări ale vieții, încă neelucidate.”

“Adevărul are putere. Iar dacă gravităm cu toții în jurul acelorași idei, o facem poate, întrucât acele idei sunt reale... înscrise adânc în noi înșine. Iar atunci când auzim adevărul, chiar dacă nu-l înțelegem, simțim că el rezonează în interiorul nostru... vibrând odată cu înțelepciunea noastră inconștientă. Poate că adevărul nu-l învățăm, ci ni-l reamintim... îl re-memorăm... îl re-cunoaștem... ca fiind deja înlăuntrul nostru.”

“Suntem creatori, dar jucăm naivi, rolul de „creație”. Ne considerăm biete oi neajutorate, mânate încolo și-ncoace de Dumnezeul care ne-a creat. Îngenunchem aidoma unor copii speriați, implorând ajutor, iertare sau noroc. Odată ce ne vom da seama însă că am fost cu adevărat modelați după chipul și asemănarea Creatorului, vom începe să înțelegem că și noi suntem, prin urmare, creatori. Iar atunci când acest lucru ne va fi clar, porțile se vor deschide larg în fața realului potențial omenesc.”

“I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.”

“It was as big as a box kite and mounted on a pole, gesticulating wildly with moving arms, vanes, wheels, and propellers larger and small. I'd never seen it. It was all different colors. It didn't resemble anything in particular, except at the top, where there was a woman's head. Attached to her hair were three reflectors. Shells and chimes hung around her neck. Even with half the moving parts stuck, a gust blowing through it set off a flurry of fluttering and shimmering and ringing, as if a flock of exotic birds was taking flight.”

“the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”

“The altar reminds us of the remoteness in which He lives “beyond the altar,” as we might say, meaning divine distance; or “above the altar,” meaning divine loftiness both to be understood of course not spatially, but spiritually. They mean that God is the Intangible One, far removed from all approaching, from all grasping; that He is the all-powerful, Majestic One immeasurably exalted above earthly things and earthly striving. Such breadth and height are founded not on measure, but on God’s essence: His holiness, to which man of himself has no access.”

“The sacred Urubamba River snakes its way through the verdant tapestry, a lifeline that nurtures the land and the spirits that dwell within. In this sacred space, time becomes fluid, the boundaries between past and present dissolving. I find myself once again tracing the footsteps of the Inca, their energy palpable in every stone, every carved symbol that adorns the sacred structures.”