Symbols Quotes - Page 39

• 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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• I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

  Richard Dawkins

  Oppression, Revulsion, Visceral

  "Fury Over Richard Dawkins's Burka Jibe as Atheist Tells of His 'visceral Revulsion' at Muslim Dress". www.dailymail.co.uk. August 10, 2010.

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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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• A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle: and patriotism is loyalty to that principle. In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely associated with the soil and the symbols of the country. But the secret sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears a lock of her hair upon his heart.

  George William Curtis

  Loyalty, Country, Heart

  George William Curtis (1894). “On the principles and character of American institutions, and the duties of American citizens, 1856-1891”

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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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• the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America.

  Richard Brautigan

  Light, White, America

  Richard Brautigan (1989). “Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar”, p.73, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

  Woodrow Wilson

  War, Men, Shooting

  Woodrow Wilson (1916). “Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson: Extracts from the Public Speeches of the Leader and Interpreter of American Democracy, with Masterpieces of Eloquence”, Best Books

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• I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

  Alan Watts

  Reality, People, Confusion

  "Individual and Society". Audio lecture,

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• Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).

  Ernst Mach

  Reality, Doe, Elements

  "The Analysis of Sensations". Book by Ernst Mach, 1897.

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• The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Loss, Effectiveness, Musician

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.121, Penguin

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• Honour both spirit and form, the sentiment within as well as the symbol without.

  Ramakrishna

  Spirit, Form, Wells

  Ramakrishna (1960). “Sayings: The Most Exhaustive Collection of Them, Their Number Being 1120”

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• Though perhaps less universally known than such figures as Einstein or Gandhi (who became symbols of our time) Daisetz Suzuki was no less remarkable a man than these. And though his work may not have had such resounding and public effect, he contributed no little to the spiritual and intellectual revolution of our time.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Spiritual, Men, Intellectual

  "Zen and the Birds of Appetite". Book by Thomas Merton, The Abbey of Gethsemani, New Directions, p. 59, 1968.

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• In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Order, Law, Organization

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 136), 1964.

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• In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Hands, Order, Watches

  "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Friedrich Hayek, American Economic Review, September 1945.

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• As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being.

  James Bovard

  Children, Gun, Media

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• Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.

  Glen Duncan

  Life, Home, Design

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• Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

  Glen Duncan

  Life, Addiction, Twists

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• By the time kids are 15, they're drunks and they're drug addicts and they're getting chicks pregnant. The parents wonder, "What did I do wrong?" What you did wrong was, you were never there. You had the kid as a status symbol, that's what went wrong. And you're paying the price for it.

  Andrew Dice Clay

  Kids, Parent, Drug

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• [Confederate flag] it's a symbol of racial hatred.

  Rick Santorum

  Hatred, Flags, Confederate

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• People complain about their griefs and sorrows and how they pray to God but find no relief from pain. But grief itself is a gift from God. It is the symbol of His compassion.

  Sarada Devi

  Pain, Grief, Compassion

  "In the Company of the Holy Mother" by Advaita Ashrama, (pp. 220-221), 1993.

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• An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Ink, Bottles, Quaint

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.58, Macmillan

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• Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Men, Primitive Man, Drawing

  Studio International 171, p. 280, June 1966.

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• Reign of blows cascading down upon your shoulders Far too many men dressed up as soldiers The lamb is brought to the ground Under the weight of the Crown A crown of thorns and dark deeds The swastika and the hammer and sickle Are symbols that reap only weeds

  Andy Partridge

  Weed, Dark, Men

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• In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem.

  Carroll Quigley

  Sake, Violence, Facts

  Carroll Quigley (1979). “The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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