Symbols Quotes - Page 32

• A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

  Carl Jung

  Sight, Goal, Promise

  Carl Gustav Jung (1976). “The Collected works”

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• Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  School, Political, Doctrine

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• Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.

  James Mackintosh

  Mind, Language, Praise

  Sir James Mackintosh (1851). “The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh: Complete in One Volume”, p.95

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• Status symbols are poor excuses for values.

  Mary Browne

  Status Symbol, Excuse, Poor

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• Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? Of mind.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Mind, Consciousness, Individual

  Entry for December 30, 1850, "The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel", Book by Henri-Frédéric Amiel, translated by Mary Augusta Ward, 1882.

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• Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.

  S. I. Hayakawa

  Struggle, Animal, Clothes

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• The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.

  Margaret Atwood

  Survival, Literature, Canada

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• Every time I see a coin on the street, I stop, pick it up, put it into my pocket, and say out loud "Thank you, God, for this symbol of abundance that keeps flowing into my life" Never once have I asked, "Why only a penny, God? You know I need a lot more than that."

  Wayne Dyer

  Thank You God, Pennies, Pockets

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• There would be no value in worship services and symbols did they not, preserved in their Purity and Beauty, serve as aids to right living.

  Lily Montagu

  Women, Religion, Would Be

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• [Keeping kosher was] the symbol of an initiation, like the insignia of a secret brotherhood, that set her apart and gave her freedom and dignity. Every law whose yoke she accepted willingly seemed to add to her freedom: she herself had chosen . . . To enter that brotherhood. Her Judaism was no longer a stigma, a meaningless accident of birth from which she could escape . . . It had become a distinction, the essence of her self-hood, what she was, what she wanted to be, not merely what she happened to be.

  Jessie Sampter

  Women, Self, Law

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• Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Passion, Fire, Elements

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• Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Music, Feelings, Emotion

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• A candle is a living, flickering light. It can easily be blown out. As we watch a candle burn we see the wax diminish. It melts away - a symbol for life. [...]
  Candles have long been central to worship.
  By lighting them we announce that we are entering into a different sense of time.
  Not the usual ticktock time of daily living, but sacred time, a timeless time.

  Gunilla Brodde Norris

  Life, Time, Book

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• Reforms often fail because politics favors symbols over substance.

  Michael J. Schmoker

  Reform, Substance, Favors

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• Among archetypal images, the Sacred Tree is one of the most widely know symbols on Earth. There are few cultures in which the Sacred Tree does not figure: as an image of the cosmos, as a dwelling place of gods or spirits, as a medium of prophecy and knowledge, and as an agent of metamorphoses when the tree is transformed into human or divine form or when it bears a divine or human image as its fruit or flowers.

  Christopher McDowell

  Flower, Dwelling Place, Tree

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• The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity with nature. We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Lying, Spring, Moving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II”, p.410

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• There are those who would keep us slipping back into the darkness of division, into the snake pit of racial hatred, of racial antagonism and of support for symbols of the struggle to keep African-Americans in bondage.

  Carol Moseley Braun

  War, Struggle, Snakes

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• My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Religious, Art, Sacrifice

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• Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it.

  Russell Baker

  Crush, Baseball, Sleep

  Russell Baker (1965). “All Things Considered”

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• Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

  Walter Gropius

  Art, Character, Hands

  "The Bauhaus Proclamation April 1919" (1919)

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• I think jeans have gotten away from the original meaning, that symbol of freedom; they've gone gimmicky and turned into a status item. Our denim is offered at lower price points for that reason. As far as the men's clothing in the collection, it's basically my wardrobe. I think men's clothes should be grounded, strong and classic. I like simple: a blazer, jeans, a low cut tee and maybe a silk scarf.

  Johan Lindeberg

  Strong, Cutting, Simple

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• Because drumming was recognized as an ancient source and symbol of the power of female technicians of the sacred, drumming was banned. Henceforth divinity was to be exclusively masculine. The suppression of women was directly linked to the suppression of the goddess.

  Layne Redmond

  Female, Drumming, Divinity

  Layne Redmond (1997). “When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm”

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• In early historical civilization, lunar symbols wove together three major metaphorical concepts. The first is the idea of fertility. The moon controls the tides of both water and blood – the sacred fluids of the early religions. The second is the concept of periodic rebirth, symbolized by the moon’s monthly waning and renewal. The third is the notion of continually repeating cycles of change.

  Layne Redmond

  Moon, Blood, Civilization

  Layne Redmond (1997). “When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm”

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• There's no way I set out to be a certain kind of symbol - the way I dress is the way I am, the way I live my life.

  Pamela Anderson

  Dresses, Way, Kind

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• Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Reading, Discovery

  "Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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