The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.
Light is the symbol of truth.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind , As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves.
An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.
I have painted and drawn bulls for some time because of their density and all the symbolism they carry.
If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.
In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hourglass - all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.
When we use numbers we are using symbols, and it is only when we transfer them to life that they become actualities. The same is true with drawing and painting. They are to be learned, not as rules, but as actualities. Then the rules become appropriate.
The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.
A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance.
I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.
I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.
Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.
Mountains in all their moods are symbols of something greater, something worth aspiring to. Mountains are powerful, dangerous, beautiful, noble and mysterious. Mountains get respect.
Symbols need not limit their scope to this pendulum swing of images.
When the symbols are 'public' they usually act in an oblique manner, revealing themselves as archetypal symbols, which though familiar, have their central meanings obscured as is usual in esoteric imagery.
It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.
or simply: