Symbolic Quotes

• Reconciliation requires changes of heart and spirit, as well as social and economic change. It requires symbolic as well as practical action.

  Malcolm Fraser

  Heart, Spirit, Action

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.

  Jerry Seinfeld

  Birthday, Self, Years

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• If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.

  Norman Thomas

  Flags, Gestures, Want

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• Tattoos are like stories - they're symbolic of the important moments in your life. Sitting down, talking about where you got each tattoo and what it symbolizes, is really beautiful.

  Pamela Anderson

  Tattoo, Beautiful, Talking

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• The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

  Hugo Ball

  Real, Views, Long

  Hugo Ball (1974). “Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary”, p.104, Univ of California Press

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• Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.

  Hermann Hesse

  Night, Soul, One Day

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• I run because it's so symbolic of life. You have to drive yourself to overcome the obstacles. You might feel that you can't. But then you find your inner strength, and realize you're capable of so much more than you thought.

  Arthur Blank

  Running, Inner Strength, Might

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• Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

  Alex Haley

  Roots, People, My Family

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• Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

  Paul Tillich

  Men, Able, Language

  Paul Tillich, F. Forrester Church (1999). “The Essential Tillich”, p.41, University of Chicago Press

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• Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

  Jacques Lacan

  Believe, Arbitrary, May

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• In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.

  S. I. Hayakawa

  Real, Drama, Years

  "Language in Thought and Action". Book by S. I. Hayakawa (p.27-28), 1991.

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• We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

  Richard Dawkins

  Technology, Space, Brain

  Richard Dawkins (1995). “River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

  Bertrand Russell

  Discovery, Mathematical Logic, Age

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Principles of Mathematics”, p.5, Routledge

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• The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

  Ezra Pound

  People, Church, Literature

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• Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance... Everything is of the blood, of the senses.

  Henry Williamson

  Expression, Blood, Utterance

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• Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Art, Feelings, Creation

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• My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

  John Dominic Crossan

  Smart, People, Dumb

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• The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.

  Boris Pasternak

  Life Is, Whole

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• Man is symbolic to the sun. The sun is dealing with a ball of fire and didn't go out yet. Me being symbolic to the sun, that's what keeps me going, that's like my hunger. That's like my fury, my self esteem. That's the elements within me that keep my body motionable. The fire is self esteem. Inner strength.

  Rakim

  Self Esteem, Men, Fire

  Source: hubpages.com

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• You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.

  Brenda Ueland

  Honesty, Believe, Writing

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• As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

  Jacques Lacan

  Lines, May, Dimensions

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• In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

  Henri Bergson

  Running, Art, Attitude

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• You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Past, Order, Years

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• Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Community, Leader, Kingdoms

  "The iPod and the Queen, the Kindle and the King" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 11, 2009.

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• A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, People, Opponents

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