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Symbolism Quotes

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Symbolism Quotes

“The cards don’t speak in absolutes. They speak in patterns, echoes and whispers of what we’re ready to hear - Intuitive Tarot: Reading Between the Lines.”

PsychologyPatternsIntuitionSelf DiscoverySymbolismTarotShadow Work
Book:Intuitive Tarot: Reading Between the Lines. The Art of Tarot Translation, Shadow Work, Pattern Recognition & Radical Self Honesty
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“Southpaw Serpent by Stewart Stafford She was a left-handed artist, More paint on her face than on canvas, 'Here, take this,' she said to me, 'It takes you to the snake with the atlas.' I grasped the nettle of her riddle, An eyeball roulette elixir of time. Each sandy step I took after that Veered from horrific to the sublime. I found myself at a beach house party, Remorse coiled in laundry bags hissed, They reeked of promise unfulfilled, And of sweet opportunities missed. Girls morphed into southpaw painters, Pointing and urging me to go on, A police raid, I fled to the rooftop, As dawn cracked open the sun. I frantically crafted glitter collages, Kaleidoscopes of close friends and I, The leftie girlie dyed her hair, judging, The winner was a mirrored all-seeing eye. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

IdentityTransformationSelf DiscoveryIntrospectionSymbolismSurreal PoetryStewart Stafford
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“I Am Chameleon by Stewart Stafford I am the shadow in your peripheral vision, A rippling in the brilliantine matrix, A wind's mesmerising, gossamer lullaby, The speck of dust for a euphoric sneeze. I am the shimmering, starry shell of night, The bird that bathes in transient pools, A cloud, shaped by myriad perspectives, Flaming phoenix flower picked to re-sprout. I am the tribal cave of rest and warmth, The cleansing pool of birth and rebirth, The fire of light, heat, and nourishment, The beloved departed's shawl on cold nights. I am soup and a sandwich on a rainy day, Banquet feast of a gathering of the clans, Caviar of the commonplace, regal remnants, An after-dinner mint to soothe and satiate. I am the floating shadow clinging to the corner of your eye. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

SpiritualPoetryGriefIdentityComfortTransformationSymbolismContemporary PoetryMythicNature Imagery
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Keepsakes . . Keep a leaf between your pages when you forget your season... some memories keep their green. Carry a feather in your pocket when the world grows weighty... some flights are never lost. Set a pebble on your desk when your thoughts scatter... some footings remain true. Hold a seashell in your palm when silence grows heavy... some songs endure. Keep a drop of rain in your memory when the days turn brittle... some renewals return.”

Life LessonsPoetryMemoriesPoetry QuotesRenewalSymbolismKeepsakesNature MetaphorsMonika Ajay Kaul
Author:Monika Ajay Kaul
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“दामिनी सी मुस्कान, व्यंग्य के समान, सुखाकर रक्त तप्त, हरता है प्राण, करता उपहास, कर पुष्प में निवास, रच विष कूट, स्वयं मधुमय मिठास, कोयल सा मधुर, झरनों का संगीत, मृत्यु का कोलाहल बन करता भीत।”

DeathMysteryMetaphorPsychologicalContrastDualitySymbolismPoetry LoveDark PoetryNature Imagery
Book:त्रिकूट: धर्म का चक्रव्यूह
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“Art is a lie that reveals deep truths. Metaphor is one way to translate experience; symbols help us stretch our minds to finger elusive and illustrative truths. Truths are not always logical and human truth finding does not fit snugly onto the silicon chip of a computer. The rational as well as the irrational unites us as specie. We share expressible knowledge and suspect within ourselves and other people the unspeakable. The unfathomable is as much a part of our celestial humanity as is the dirt clutching our shoes, which accumulated grime grounds us to physical reality.”

TruthMetaphorSymbolsTruth QuotesTruth Of LifeSymbolicSymbolismMetaphoricalMetaphorically Speaking
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“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.”

LoveMemoryMetaphorSubconsciousSymbolismCall Me By Your NameAndre AcimanSymbol
Book:Call Me by Your Name
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“Why do writers use symbolism?” Okay, so let’s say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, “I have a headache!” and other people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches.” But your headache is not a regular headache, it’s a serious headache, so you say, “My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let’s say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one’s dreams. And you can see the dream but you can’t cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier – a bay-like barrier, some would say – that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable…. So I think that’s why.”

WritingDreamMetaphorWritersWriters On WritingSymbolismVlogbrothersGreat Gatsby
Author:John Green
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“Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.”

ParentsSymbolismRevelationDysfunction
Book:The corrections
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“Timelessly, that flame flickered. Unquenchable upon its undying wick. Fluctuating, pulsating, Dimming to near darkness at moments only to spark the clearer. Endlessly, that fire wickered. Ubiquitous in its guiding light. Permeating, coalescing, All-encompassing of the smallest point and grandest of spheres. Boundlessly, that blaze bickered. Ultimate in its infinite valour. Contesting, challenging, And settling with the edge of infinity, that ultimate bound severe.”

PoemSupernaturalSymbolism
Book:The Sapphire Shore
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“It is not a person or situation that affects your life; it is the meaning you give to that person or situation, which influences your emotions and actions. Your choice is to change the meaning you gave it or to change your response, in order to create the outcome you want.”

LoveHappinessJoyWinningGrowthChangeFreedomSituationDreamsTrustPerspectiveEgoLosingEmotionsSlaveryCompetitionIntuitionPursueOutcomesSentimentsFightPassivePersonOutlookPositive OutlookSymbolismLeaveGoStaySignsNegative EmotionsComeBad SituationsPositive EmotionsAffectHard QuestionsMeaningsNo TrustSaddnessAgressiveDon T FightNegative OutlookBad PerceptionGood SituationsDon T PursueGood PerceptionLack Of IntuitionMeanings We Give PeopleMeanings We Give SituationsWhat It Means To YouWrong Perception
Author:Shannon L. Alder
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“As all material creation consists of out-births of things spiritual, the spiritual world being the world of causes, and the natural world that of effects, and as effects are the repositories of their causes, the natural world is the reflection of the spiritual. For this reason, from the beginning of things, the sun has stood out as a pre-eminent symbol of the things of God. Of all inanimate things it bears the closest correspondence to the Supreme Being, for what it is in the natural world the Supreme Being is in the Spiritual. Its central fire is the correspondence of the essence of the Divine Nature--DIVINE LOVE; its heat the correspondence of the heat flowing from Divine Love, which is Divine Goodness and all that that comprises; its light the correspondence of Divine Truth which is the light proceeding from Divine Wisdom; and the union of heat and light in its central essence forever symbolizes the union of the Divine Love and Wisdom resulting from that of the Divine Will and Understanding. God is the SUN from whose heat and light--His Love and Wisdom--proceed all that is spiritual, and through the spiritual, by the medium of the natural sun, all that is natural. The sun is supreme in all natural things, and its operations run through all in its own world, but the Divine SUN from which it derives its origin is supreme in all and operates through all, above and below. And as the natural sun is everywhere present in its own realm, and all things derive their life and grow in more or less perfect measure according to their forms and distances, so is the Supreme One omnipresent, filling both the spiritual and the natural world.”

PhilosophySpiritualReligionNaturalSunDivineReflectionSymbolismDruids
Book:The Philosophy of Ancient Britain
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“DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan. VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child is this! (To Dyer) These are only our Devices, and are like the Paint of our Painted Age. DYER. But in Meditation the Sunne is a vast and glorious Body, and Thunder is the most forcible and terrible Phaenomenon: it is not to be mocked, for the highest Passion is Terrour.”

PlaySunThunderSymbolismPlays
Book:Hawksmoor
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“I felt as if my own personality was changing shades or even as if I had no personality. I was a blank canvas and I let people paint their own shadows onto me freely. With what was left of my intuition I must have grasped the symbolism of it. This must be the explanation why when we were all asked by our literature teacher 'What animal do you indetify with?' I answered 'chameleon'.”

PsychologyDepressionShadowIntuitionSymbolismJungChameleonShadow WorkCarl Jung
Book:Awakening Ignited
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“Not much to say except to warn you not to get too serious about all this, if you want to become a writer of fiction in the future. If you intend to become a critic, that is a Whale of another color…Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story…humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels…Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing…and as unobtrusive.”

CriticismLetterSymbolism
Author:Ray Bradbury
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“His mouth went dry and for a split second he had a metallic taste on the sides of his tongue. He stood, turned, and gulped. A vision had appeared from somewhere. Was she real? She was tall, with long, glossy light-gold hair surrounding a perfectly shaped face. The front of her silk white robe was open down to a delightful cleavage where a long silver cross hung. As she walked slowly past Alec to sit at the desk, the robe parted for a fleeting glimpse of her leg. A scent of lily of the valley meandered over him. A hand with long graceful fingers indicated for him to sit again in his chair. She was real! She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman Alec had ever seen.”

BetrayalMelancholySymbolismRefugeesLove And LossDetective FictionEmotional ComplexityFirsthand AccountsCriminal MastermindsChurch Murder
Book:The Wasp Trap
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“آه يا طائر الطفولة النائح قل لي لِمَّ كل هذا النواح؟ قل لي لِمَ كل هذا العويل؟ آه يا طائري الذي صاحبني منذ الطفولة لِمَ طبعت نواحك وألصقت عويلك وآهاتك في كل ضحكاتي في كل ابتساماتي في ملامحي في نبراتي؟ آه يا رفيق الطفولة لقد بات الجميع يتجنبني بسببك لئلا أذكرهم بعويلهم الذي دفنوه وصرخاتهم التي أخرسوها ليتمكنوا من مواصلة العيش ...”

LifePoetryCreativityChildhoodMeaning Of LifeSymbolismArabic PoetryArabic Literature
Author:Louis Yako
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“I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)”

RealRealityDeathChildhoodConfusionMaturityAdolescenceDeath PenaltySurrealSymbolismCapital PunishmentInfantileSignBaudelaireSignificationMotor Vehicle Accident
Book:The Art of the Novel
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“Baudrillard argues that there used to be a time when the role of objects was primarily to signify rather than to function. Thus, the symbolic structure of the traditional domestic ambience reflected the rituals and traditions of the socio-political order, arranged according to prescriptive and unchanging rules based on, and extracted from, ‘tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together […] Hence, the fixed and immovable meanings with which these objects were endowed: if mirrors and family portraits symbolized a particular sense of introspection and enclosure, the clock crowning the marble mantelpiece symbolized both the hierarchical structure of the family and the permanence of time. Linked to one meaning and one meaning only, every object of the traditional domestic interior can thus be understood as theatrical and ceremonial, thus occupying a specific place within the domestic interior exactly as family members occupy a specific position in their corresponding family tree.”

FamilyFunctionSymbolismInterior DesignBaudrillard
Book:Baudrillard for Architects
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“Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence.”

RealismSymbolismDecadenceBalzacZolaDecadentsSymbolistMaupassantFlaubert
Author:Vasily Rozanov
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“Sorry,” Wakefield insists, “but what exactly is cultural imperialism?” The boy turns his good eye to Wakefield. “That when Indian kids play with Mickey Mouse instead of kachinas. Kachinas mean something to their people. The Mouse means nothing.” “He must mean something,” Wakefield says. “Yeah, he means money. A Kachina tells the story of the earth, of the people, of dances, rituals, how to make rain… Talk to the fucking mouse and see what he tells you.”

CultureSpiritualitySymbolismAppropriationEmpty Signs
Book:Wakefield
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“My very first necklace, from my grandmother, had a swan pendant. Now, as an adult, I do still wear a swan pendant and it's my favourite one. I have been on dates wearing it and always get the same comment: "Did you know that swans may look graceful and elegant but they can break your arms with their wings?" They always say it like it's a bad thing. I think it's one of the most fantastic things in nature!”

SymbolismSwansWomens InspirationalWomens EmpowermentWomens StrengthSwan
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it”

LanguageReasoningSymbolismPrincipleMechanical
Book:A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation
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