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Symbolism Quotes

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Symbolism Quotes

“Amid the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to recognize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and the wilderness, by comparison, came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word wilderness was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy.”

CivilizationWildernessNature QuotesSymbolismIndustrialismCivilization Vs Nature
Book:On Trails: An Exploration
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“...this cryptic game of hide-and-seek is what makes it one of the greatest historical mysteries. So many of the symbols can be interpreted in so many different ways, there's always the possibility that all we're really looking at is a blank slate onto which anything can be read.”

MysterySymbolsInterpretationConspiracyPossibilitiesCritical ThinkingSymbolismConspiracy TheoryConspiracy TheoriesMysteriesHide And SeekCrypticConspiraciesCluesProjectingBlank SlateSymbologyReading Into ThingsReading Into EverythingSymbology TransferenceFollowing CluesInterpreting Literature
Book:History Decoded: The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
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“Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town”

SadnessLonelinessRubbishSymbolismTrampTubeCamden TownKings CrossTatterdemallion
Book:In Camden Town
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“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares." "So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans." "What a disappointment," I said. "I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood?”

ReligionChristianityMythologySymbolismFablesUnicorns
Book:The Name of the Rose
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“Изморось поливала прохожих: награждала их гриппами; вместе с тонкою пылью дождя инфлуэнцы и гриппы заползали под приподнятый воротник: гимназиста, студента, чиновника, офицера, субъекта; и субъект (так сказать, обыватель) озирался тоскливо; и глядел на проспект стерто-серым лицом; циркулировал он в бесконечность проспектов, преодолевал бесконечность, без всякого ропота — в бесконечном токе таких же, как он,— среди лёта, грохота, трепетанья, пролеток, слушая издали мелодичный голос автомобильных рулад и нарастающий гул желто-красных трамваев (гул потом убывающий снова), в непрерывном окрике голосистых газетчиков.”

WowSymbolismWording
Book:Petersburg
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“The notion that talking-animal narratives are not really about animals—that the worthwhile ones, at least, must surely be about something more than mere animals—is quite consistent with the far wider cultural trivialization and marginalization of the animal. The animal content of literary, artistic and other cultural productions is seldom regarded as a serious or proper field of inquiry.”

LiteratureAnimalsRepresentationSymbolismOthernessNarratologyHuman Animal Studies
Book:The Mythology of the Animal Farm in Children's Literature: Over the Fence
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“For the philosophers of ancient Babylonia and Greece the sense world was not considered an illusion. In the search for Divine, they turned towards art, towards symbols and signs within myths and legends. They created such a marvel of art that every detail became an expression of the spiritual. In mysterious ways the wisdom of the initiates poured into poets, artists, and thinkers. They awakened powers of thought and feeling that are not directly stimulated by the spiritual world. Manipulating the elements, they turned towards the Lady Science and carried her principles to the point that we are now able to manipulate the sound, the light, the matter and its manifestation.”

SpiritualityDivineWisdom QuotesSymbolsSpiritual GrowthMind Body SpiritOccultSymbolismAncient GreeceSoul And Spirit
Book:Spiritual Symbols
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“While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.”

VampirePessimismZombieSymbolismSupernatural Horror Stories1991
Book:Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
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“Both the boys noticed that Mr. Smith was twisting a crested gold ring on his finger. "Looks like a school emblem," Frank thought, then suddenly realized what the man was telling him. "He's from SKOOL!" Joe got the message at the same time and threw a quick glance at his brother. Dell smiled. "I felt sure you would understand. It is safer if some things are not said aloud. Mr. Smith and I work together." So Dell was also a member of SKOOL, working under the guise of security officer for Great Circle Airways!”

CommunicationGesturesSymbolismBody LanguageMannerismsHardy BoysTicksHigh ContextSecret Codes
Book:The Secret Agent on Flight 101
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“Once I've coated the parsnips in a honey-saffron glaze, Rachel helps me plate them alongside the brisket, stuffed cabbage, and sweet potato tzimmes, and we carry the plates out to the dining room together. "Let me explain a little about tonight's dinner," I say, addressing the softly lit faces around the table, which is covered with flickering votives and tapered candles. I launch into a description of the Jewish New Year and the symbolism behind all of the food: how the honey represents the hope of a sweet new year, how the challah is round instead of braided to represent the circle of life, how my grandmother used to make stuffed cabbage on every possible occasion because it reminded her of her Hungarian mother. I tell them lots things- about food, about my bubbe, about me- and to my surprise, they actually pay attention. They hang on my every word and ask intelligent questions and make thought-provoking points of their own. And I realize, hey, these are people who get it, people who love to eat and talk about food and culture as much as I do. Most of them aren't Jewish, but that doesn't matter. Every family has its traditions. Every family has a story to share. That's the point of this dinner- to swap stories and histories and see how food can bring people together.”

New YearSymbolismJewish FoodSupper ClubExchanges
Book:The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs
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“The feeling filters in for an instant, then rushes out, leaving lasting watermarks of nostalgia. Neurotransmitters will only impart tired old platitudes of common structure: trite anecdotes with predictable elements. No doubt the perception of this Moment will recede back in with the waves and leave me once again looking to symbols for recollection. But then, perhaps it is wrong of me to think of it this way. It is, yes.”

MemoryIntuitionSymbolismPerception Of RealityNeurotransmittersFeeling And Thought
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.”

WritingSpiritualSpiritualityHopeExpectationsMemoirSymbolsHopefulIdealismAutobiographyMysticalWriting ProcessAuthorsSymbolismMemoir WritingIdealistExpectationIdealisticPersonal EssaysHopeful QuotesEssay WritingExpectations QuotesPersonal EssayIdealists
Author:Kilroy J. Oldster
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“Insignificance by Stewart Stafford From the emerald Draco star, Fell the coiled Rosslyn figure, Unwinding into elongated form, The golden crozier of St Patrick. Faded gods upon ruined temples, All came alive, screeching creeds, Overwhelming minds and bodies, Fanatics expiring from confusion. In the shamanic ritualistic dance, Of an in-out, Hokey-Cokey culture, Spins the stained mah-jongg piece, The missing link apes checkmate. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”

SnakesSymbolismSerpentSnakeShamanDracoSt PatrickSignifiersMah JonggHokey Cokey
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")”

SymbolismDecadenceDecadentsSymbolist
Book:Silver Age of Russian Culture
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“It was during this final Parisian period of Rodenbach's life that his literary absorption in Bruges really rose and flowered. Bruges-La-Morte was the Paris literary sensation of 1892, and he followed it with La Vocation in 1895, and Le Carilloneur (translated as The Bells of Bruges) in 1897. This kind of immersion at a distance is hardly unknown - think of Joyce, minutely anatomizing Dublin in Ulysses while living in Trieste - but it is also quintessentially Symbolist in its concern with the richness and plenitude of absence: 'The essence of art that is in any way noble is the DREAM,' wrote Rodenbach, 'and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.' (Introduction)”

SymbolismSymbolist
Book:Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories
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“It seems to me that apart from the aptness of the Malay language in the construction of four-lined verses with a AAAA pattern of rhyme, the influence of Ibnu’l-‘Arabi’s and ‘Iraqi’s four-line shi’r and Jami’s ruba’i, the concept of the bayt and the shi’r in Arabic and Persian prosody, the creative genius of the poet, Hamzah’s choice of the four-line shi’r composed of a single bayt could well have been influenced also by the symbolism in the Sufi doctrines.”

SufismSufiSymbolismTasawwufHamzah FansuriIraqiIbnu Arabi
Book:The Origin of the Malay Sha'ir
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“The analogy of the fourfold Law Way, Truth and Gnosis in which they are compared to a house may be said to be a static one, and this is because what is aimed at here is comprehension of the concept of the absolute unity of the Way to the Truth; but the spiritual journey itself is a dynamic concept, and hence sometimes the fourfold unity of the Way to the Truth is also to a ship (kapal) whose keel is like the Law, whose planks are like the Way, whose content or merchandise is like the Truth and whose gain is like the spiritual gain of Gnosis.”

TruthSufismSufiSymbolismTasawwufHamzah FansuriSyariahHaqiqahMakrifah
Book:The Origin of the Malay Sha'ir
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“When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?" Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma's mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme. The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"- namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love. That is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. 'Polygonum,' with its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh.”

MysticismSymbolismBook TitleMedicinal HerbsJacob BoehmeMedicinal Plants
Book:The Signature of All Things
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“When not through external events, spirit communicates “internally” via symbols and signs. Symbolic language, like music, is universal and crosses beyond the limitations of verbal and written languages. It is a divine communication. Essentially, the Spirit is using All means necessary to inspire us and to get our attention – not an easy task in the material world of sights, sounds, online messages, TV and movies - and commercialism!”

SymbolismSpiritual DevelopmentSymbology
Book:Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook
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“The Ballad of Harry Lime by Stewart Stafford Harry found existence overrated, And its shadow, morality, so outdated, Scurrying rats down here in the sewer, Porcine gluttons in punished manure. Grand aspirations from primordial slime, Lifting up the rock from time to time, Samson, destroying a temple of hypocrisy, And every pillar - hope, faith and charity, They'd had him from baptism's font, Trapped before wording his wants, A heel dipped in brackish liturgy, Silent collusion in mass duplicity. For those who remained in smoky rubble? Rudely awakened from a cocoon bubble: An obelisk erected to grotesque finance, Charon’s fee for a Stygian dance. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”

MysteryCrimeCorruptionSymbolismNoirDisillusionmentAntiheroOrson WellesThe Third ManHarry Lime
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The pumpkin itself is a symbol for mortality. Like mortals, the pumpkin seed is planted in the darkness of the earth, where it is left to search for the light. When the plant finally sprouts, it travels along the ground, as if in search of its place in the world. Then, once the pumpkin has found its place, it blossoms into a fruit that towers above all others. And when the pumpkin is ripe, it's a veritable life-giving force.”

GardeningHalloweenSymbolismPumpkinPumpkinsPumpkin HeadGarden Symbolism
Book:Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
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“We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give.”

ScienceSpiritConsciousnessPhysicsSymbolism
Book:Science and the unseen world
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“Contrary to what a narrowly positivist conception of human sciences would like, these are not only about the real world, but also about two other dimensions, just as important: the imaginary dimension, which governs representations and fictions; and the symbolic dimension, which governs meanings and interpretations, more or less conscious. These three dimensions of reality — the reality of lived situations, the imagination as conveyed by discursive or iconic forms, the symbolism of productions of meaning — cannot be reduced to each other, because they possess their own necessity and coherence.”

RealityImaginationInterpretationSymbolism
Book:Wat onze identiteit niet is
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“लोग कहते मैं निशा का करती हूँ मान-मर्दन, किन्तु निशा ने स्वयं ही कर लिया मेरा वरण। निशा मेरे संग से जगमगाती है, कालिमा उसकी मेरी लौ को सजाती है। निशा मेरे संग से होती है तृप्त, मैं उसकी नंदिनी कहलाती, निशिदीप्त।”

LightPoetryNightDarknessMysticismTranscendenceDualitySymbolismSelf IdentityFeminine Energy
Book:त्रिकूट: धर्म का चक्रव्यूह
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“As we light our Advent candles, adding a new one each week, we move from darkness to light. Our ritual symbolically anticipates the birth or our Savior, Jesus Christ, who will actually move us from darkness to light if we will let Him. Advent invites us to worship at the manger, but if we stop there, we have missed the meaning of Christ’s birth. His advent is the beginning of the path that takes Jesus from the light of the wonderful star that signals His birth, to the terrible darkness of his full and final sacrifice, and then on to the blinding brilliant light of His resurrection, which is the advent of ours. As we return to the manger, let us not forget the meaning of his birth and the purpose of His life. He came to save, deliver, and redeem us: O come, let us adore Him!”

LightDarknessJesus ChristRitualAdoreSymbolismAdventRedeemDeliver
Author:Jean-Michel Hansen
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