Symbolism Quotes - Page 2

• What they will try to do is get symbolic victories. Symbolism is important to them. They have little else. But they will strike, I believe, at centers of media, of financial, of American power, of American culture; and that is where we should place our bet.

  James T. Walsh

  Believe, Power, Media

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• There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.

  Lascelles Abercrombie

  Epic, Destiny, Men

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• 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.

  Edward Sapir

  Important, World, Language

  Edward Sapir, Pierre Swiggers (2008). “General Linguistics”, p.281, Walter de Gruyter

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• 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.

  Maurice Ravel

  Men, Thinking, Profound

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• Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

  Philip Pullman

  Book, Philosopher, Mysterious

  Philip Pullman (1995). “Northern lights”

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• I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Hidden Meaning, Deals, Verses

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• I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Book, Writing

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• 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.

  Christopher Lasch

  Feelings, Popular Song, Purpose

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• 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.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Engineering, Trying, Statistics

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• We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

  Cesare Pavese

  Art, Opposites, Two

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.146, Transaction Publishers

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• Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Art, Mean, Men

  Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 487), 1996.

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• Americans have a taste for…rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Horse, Thinking, Race

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• I wish that our culture could retain the symbolism and emotional power of traditional religion while combining it with reason and science and using the combination to enhance our humanity rather than impoverishing it by choosing the one side or the other.

  Allen W. Wood

  Emotional, Humanity, Wish

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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

  Aaron Eckhart

  Thinking, Important, Code

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• One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now."

  John Green

  Girl, Real, Book

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• The Masonic movement... is the custodian of the law; it is the home of the Mysteries and the seat of initiation. It holds in its symbolism the ritual of Deity, and the way of salvation is pictorially preserved in its work. It is a far more occult organization than can be realised, and is intended to be the training school for the coming advanced occultists. In its ceremonials lie hid the wielding of the forces connected with the growth and life of the kingdoms of nature and the unfoldment of the divine aspects in man.

  Alice Bailey

  Lying, Home, School

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• [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.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Winning, Thinking, White

  Source: www.npr.org

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• 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.

  The Weeknd

  Stories, Spoons, Grew Up

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• All religious expression is symbolism.

  Albert Pike

  Religious, Expression

  Albert Pike (2013). “Morals and Dogma”, p.57, Simon and Schuster

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

  Jesse Jackson

  Substance, Vote, Ifs

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• Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

  Haruki Murakami

  Dream, Butterfly, Artist

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• The creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally with primitive symbolism and rigorous logic.

  Frank X. Barron

  Home, Creative, Genius

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• We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I learned from this exercise was not to begin a sentence with "And." When I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with "And," I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves at that time was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible.

  Stephen Hawking

  Kings, Taught, Vain

  "My Brief History". Book by Stephen Hawking, September 10, 2013.

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• 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.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Spiritual, People, Important

  "Sculpting in Time" by Andrei Tarkovsky, (p. 149), 1986.

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• 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.

  Paul Schrader

  Character, Thinking, Differences

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