Symbolic Quotes - Page 6

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

Sebastiao Salgado

Photography, Symbolism, Able

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Source truth exists in greater abundance outside of the symbolic system of words.

Bryant H. McGill

Abundance, Source, Greater

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It seems as if it is only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.

Carl Jung

Philosophy, Reality, Men

Carl Gustav Jung (1981). “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, p.110, Princeton University Press

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Whether the author intended a symbolic resonance to exist in her book is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it's there. Because the book does not exist for the benefit of the author, the book exists for the benefit of YOU. If we as readers can have a bigger and richer experience with the world as a result of reading a symbol and that symbol wasn't intended by the author, WE STILL WIN.

John Green

Book, Reading, Winning

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The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

Roman Jakobson

Running, Taken, Giving

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As for my feelings toward "Over the Rainbow", it's become part of my life. It is so symbolic of all dreams and wishes that I'm sure that's why people sometimes get tears in their eyes when they hear it.

Judy Garland

Dream, Eye, People

"Over the Rainbow : The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America". Book by Paul Nathanson, 1991.

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To speak, therefore, of an electric current in the nerves, is to use quite as symbolic an expression as if we compared the action of the nervous principle with light or magnetism.

Johannes Peter Muller

Expression, Light, Electric Current

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Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.

Susanne Katherina Langer

Expression, Religion, Culture

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When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.

Slavoj Žižek

Agency, Authority, Brute Force

Slavoj Žižek (2001). “Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out”, p.94, Psychology Press

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I don't have a favorite cooking tool. In the kitchen, I always have my pencil and notebook in my hand. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical. The pencil has a symbolic meaning for me. The type of person who carries a pencil around is the type of person who's open to change. Someone who walks around with a pen isn't; he's the opposite.

Ferran Adria

Notebook, Jobs, Creativity

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Isn't it wonderful that two of the most sacred and symbolic plants, the olive and the vine, live on almost nothing, a terrace of limestone, sun and rain.

Janet Erskine Stuart

Rain, Two, Vines

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All our knowledge is symbolic.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art, Philosophy, History

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This morning President Obama met with Britain's Prince William in the Oval Office. It was a meeting between a symbolic ruler with no real power and the future king of England.

Conan O'Brien

Morning, Kings, Real

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The fifth and by far the most important reason is that stoning is literally a means of crushing the murderer's head by means of a rock, which is symbolic of God. This is analogous to the crushing of the head of the serpent in Genesis 3:15. This symbolism testifies to the final victory of God over all the hosts of Satan. Stoning is therefore integral to the commandment against murder.

Gary North

Crush, Mean, Rocks

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The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Anais Nin

Unity, Enough, Universal

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Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express cultural conflict or even social protest.

Kim Chernin

Country, May, Able

Kim Chernin (1982). “The obsession: reflections on the tyranny of slenderness”, HarperCollins Publishers

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The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life.

Mary Pratt

Reality, Firsts, Symbols

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The purpose of a fishing trip is not to catch fish. Bringing home meat is important, but it is more symbolic than necessary, as the new morality of catch-and-release has shown. What is important is what happens between people on fishing trips, especially between uncles and nephews, fathers and sons, old men in general and young boys in particular, it is one of the few times men are together without women.

Paul G. Quinnett

Uncles, Father, Home

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People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Media, People, Captives

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2001). “Flow: the psychology of optimal experience”

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In response to the escalating violence in Iraq, President Bush is delaying the return home of 25,000 troops and will actually add reinforcements to the south. Then in a symbolic gesture he pulled down the mission accomplished banner, put on a flight suit, walked backwards to a jet fighter and flew it in reverse off an aircraft carrier.

Tina Fey

Home, Iraq, President

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Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Expression, People, Goal

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One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect, and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking.

Madeleine L'Engle

Thinking, Intuition, Revolution

Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.76, Convergent Books

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It is our fall from a simplicity and fullness of life directly experienced, from the sensuous moment of knowing, which leaves a gap that the symbolic can never bridge.

John Zerzan

Fall, Fullness Of Life, Bridges

John Zerzan (2002). “Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation”

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It is quite likely ... that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure, but if you could travel ... back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.

Robert M. Price

Jesus, Uncles, Historical

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Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

Richard Rohr

Religious, Jesus, Nice

Richard Rohr (2013). “Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self”, p.35, SPCK

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