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Symbol Quotes

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Symbol Quotes

“Every tattoo radiates an overall energy frequency, and its individual elements such as color, size, shape, and symbology radiate their own energies as well. Learning about these individual elements of tattoos is empowering, as you can use this important knowledge to construct a better car, bake a tastier cake, or win more games, so to speak. When we see tattoos and art in general as dynamic energies radiating from their various elements, all art suddenly takes on considerably more value than just the personal meaning we attach to it.”

EnergyColorTattooColorsTattoosShapeSymbolSBody Art
Book:The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know
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“Using the delicate cloth like a handkerchief to protect the brittle pages, she opened the first book she had unearthed: On Dragons. "Oh, how wonderful!" she murmured to herself, gazing at the wildly colored illustrations of giant reptiles, winged and breathing fire. The Chaucerian English was going to take some work to decipher. She would have to see what reference texts she could find in the collection to help her work out the captions, but for now, the pictures fascinated her. The next page showed a silver-armored knight astride a galloping white steed. Armed with a lance, he was shown charging at the hideous, horned dragon that loomed over him, its black, batlike wings outstretched. The knight in the picture had a winged ally of his own, however. In the sky above him hovered none other than St. Michael the Archangel again, her old friend from the duke's family chapel. Come to think of it, she mused, wasn't that white Maltese cross on the little knight's pennant another detail she had noticed in the chapel? She turned the page and stopped at the next colorful picture of a dragon holding its egg in its claws. Some sort of curious symbol was depicted inside the rounded contours of the egg. Kate furrowed her brow and leaned closer, studying the symbol on the dragon's egg. A tingle of faint recognition ran down her spine. I've seen this before. The symbol showed an eight-spoked wagon wheel, with a flaming torch in the center. Beneath the wheel was the Latin motto, Non serviam. Easy enough to translate: "I will not serve.”

DiscoveryLatinSymbolKate MadsenOld Book Findings
Book:My Dangerous Duke
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“But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.”

ArtHistoryCommunicationMeaningContentArt HistorySymbolSignIconographyHumanitiesVisual ArtsVisual CommunicationIconology
Book:Meaning in the Visual Arts
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“when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into the property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life.”

SecuritySacredCertaintySecularRomanticismSymbolSignUniformPasenowThe Romantic
Book:The Sleepwalkers
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