Symbols Quotes - Page 27

I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me.

M. C. Escher

Thinking, Ideas, Facts

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To our way of thinking the Indians' symbol is the circle, the hoop. Nature wants to be round. The bodies of human beings and animals have no corners. With us, the circle stands for togetherness of people who sit with one another around the campfire, relatives and friends united in peace while the sacred pipe passes from hand to hand. To us this is beautiful and fitting, symbol and reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature.

John Fire Lame Deer

Beautiful, Reality, Thinking

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It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Education, Appreciation, Mean

"Return to Mathematical Circles". Book by Howard Eves, 1988.

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I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me and that I've made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much, and I can't live up to it.

Marilyn

Sex, Men, Made

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In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.

Ken Wilber

Lying, Book, Reality

Ken Wilber (2004). “The Simple Feeling of Being: Visionary, Spiritual, and Poetic Writings”, p.141, Shambhala Publications

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In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

Bertrand Russell

Fall, Reality, Errors

Bertrand Russell (2007). “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, p.170, Spokesman Books

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It is not to be wondered that men have worshiped the ocean, for in his depths they have seen mirrored the image of Eternity of Infinity. Here they have seen the symbol of God's great plan of oneness with His creatures, for the sea is the union of all infinite particles, and it takes the whole to make the one.

Elbert Hubbard

Ocean, Men, Sea

Elbert Hubbard (1916). “The Philosophy of Elbert Hubbard”

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I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.

Devdutt Pattanaik

Writing, Focus, Chinese

Sunday Hindu Interview, devdutt.com. November 1, 2009.

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His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them

J. D. Salinger

Thinking, Ice, Imagination

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So often we look at a calendar of days as merely a symbol of the passage of time. We forget why we are on this earth. We forget that there is a reason for all the pain and the struggle.

Lynn Andrews

Inspirational, Life, Pain

Lynn V. Andrews (1993). “Walk in Balance: Meditations with Lynn Andrews”, Harper San Francisco

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The word is a sign or symbol of the impressions or affections of the soul.

Aristotle

Soul, Affection, Impression

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I do want an expensive honeymoon. Not because I'm extravagant, but because a honeymoon is a solemn, important thing ... a symbol. And it ought to be done -- well, adequately.

Arnold Bennett

Important, Done, Want

Arnold Bennett (1910). “The Honeymoon: A Comedy in Three Acts”, New York : G.H. Doran

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It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .

Jorge Luis Borges

Incredibles, Should, Premonition

Jorge Luis Borges (1999). “Everything and Nothing”, p.40, New Directions Publishing

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Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

C. Wright Mills

Kings, Divine Right, People

"Character and Social Structure". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1953.

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As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.

C. Wright Mills

Labor Force, People, Individual

"White Collar: The American Middle Classes". Study by C. Wright Mills, 1951.

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I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason.

Fidel Castro

Ideas, Political, Fields

"Fidel & Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology". Book by Fidel Castro and‎ Frei Betto, 1985.

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It took time for the church to come to terms with the ignominy of the cross. Church fathers forbade its depiction in art until the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine.... Now, though, the symbol is everywhere: artists beat gold into the shape of the Roman execution device, baseball players cross themselves before batting, and cancy confectioners even make chocolate crosses for the faithful to eat during Holy Week. Strange as it may seem, Christianity has become a religion of the cross--the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber, in modern terms.

Philip Yancey

Baseball, Art, Father

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Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.

Laura Riding

Men, Romance, Noble

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Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.' A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.

Laura Riding

Names, Ideas, Two

"Poetry and Politics". "The Common Asphodel". Book by Robert Graves, 1949.

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In early childhood, children develop a set of symbols that 'stand for' things they see in the world around them... Children are happy with symbolic drawing until about the age of eight or nine... when children develop a passion for realism. Our schools do not provide drawing instruction. Children try on their own to discover the secrets of realistic drawing, but nearly always fail and, sadly, give up on trying.

Betty Edwards

Children, Giving Up, Passion

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Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

John French Sloan

Art, Color, Drawing

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In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).

Cesare Pavese

Art, Strong, Sex

Cesare Pavese (2017). “This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950”, p.286, Routledge

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A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

Marianne Moore

Mastery, Firsts, Made

Marianne Moore (1994). “Complete Poems”, p.165, Penguin

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Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations.

Arthur Koestler

Zero, Men, Political

Arthur Koestler (2011). “Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, p.12, University of Chicago Press

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If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality.

Arthur Koestler

Reality, Self, May

"The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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