Symbolism Quotes

Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language.

To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. It has always seemed to me that symbolism should be restored to the structure of world education. The young are no longer invited to seek the hidden truths, dynamic and eternal, locked within the shapes and behavior of living beings.

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism - the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales.

All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.

I usually dont like to spoon feed my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment,
a castration symbolism.
'Give up your masculinity,
let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims,
'and you will be rewarded,
accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you,
a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

I think they are very important because westerns have a code and a symbolism.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty. This is pristine natural beauty. it is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal, a beauty derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations.

If you wear a hoodie but aren't registered to vote, you got the symbolism but missed the substance.

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.

The profuse phallic symbolism of chess provides some fantasy gratification of the homosexual wish, particularly the desire for mutual masturbation.

It is not strange that men of note and learning, attracted by the wealth of symbolism on Masonry, as well as by its spirit of fraternity perhaps, also by its secrecy began at an early date to ask to be accepted as members of the order; hence Accepted Masons. How far back the custom of admitting such men to the Lodge goes is not clear, but hints of it are discernable in the oldest documents of the order.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.

Western people often see obscenity where there is only symbolism.

Love wants to be confirmed with concrete symbols, but recklessness loves instability.

In the vast majority of cases the secret society symbolism hearkens from two places - Ireland and Egypt.

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.

All religious expression is symbolism.

I don't want the Obama era to be more about symbolism than substance when it comes to black people. I love him, but I love black people even more.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't say, `I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,' but of course it does.

I have painted and drawn bulls for some time because of their density and all the symbolism they carry.

I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

I'm obviously attuned to pick up mathematics whenever I can see it. But in Mozart there is a lot of conscious use of mathematical symbolism and numbers in order to try and give messages.

I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

You know, when you're in your twenties you use a great deal of symbolism. You somehow think that a character standing beneath a cross is more interesting than a character standing underneath a billboard, but when you get a little older you realize that there's not much difference.

[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself. The symbolism was in - and this sounds really, really small, but it's actually big for African-Americans - the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.

Does it make all the difference in the world? No. But there's a great deal of symbolism associated with whether we're going to add $24 billion to the debt in unwanted and unnecessary pork-barrel projects.

I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

The symbolism in any kind of dance allows for recall, reenactment, and reexperience of events for purposes of resisting, reducing, transforming, and escaping stress.