Symbolic Quotes

According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.

A symbolic victory is still a victory.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.

Clothes allow you to see yourself in a different light. They can transform you instantly and have a very real, visceral impact. Clothes become symbolic of who we are.

People can make symbolic gestures but doesn't mean their life changes. One philanthropic moment doesn't make a life of renewal; of change.

Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.

Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?

Something can be symbolic without being a mere stand-in or vessel, which just brings us away from the true mystery and dread, into some boring version of what we already know. So what you say is true, in that the bear is a kind of parallel to the speaker, or imagined as such, but also very different. So if it's a symbol it is - ahem - a polysemous one.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.

The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society.

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.

When women breached the power structure in the 1980s?two economies finally merged. Beauty was no longer just a symbolic form of currency: it literally became money.

Creation was given to people as a clean window through which the light of God could shine into people's souls. Sun and moon, night and day, rain, sea, the crops, the flowering tree, all these things were transparent. They spoke to people not of themselves but only of Him who made them. Nature was symbolic. But the progressive degradation of humans led them further and further from this truth. Nature became opaque.

I think of many of my photographs as being obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious. There isn't any specific correlation between the symbols in this image and any content that I have in mind.

Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

Our President has given symbolic support to the National Day of Prayer but I believe that our nation needs an impassioned call to our collective knees.

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it's also a symbolic journey - a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.

Reconciliation requires changes of heart and spirit, as well as social and economic change. It requires symbolic as well as practical action.

The rise of casino capitalism and the punishing state with their vast apparatuses of real and symbolic violence must be also addressed as part of a broader historical and political attack on public values, civic literacy and economic justice. Crucial here is the need to engage how such an attack is aided and abetted by the emergence of a poisonous neoliberal public pedagogy that depoliticizes as much as it entertains and corrupts.

What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

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.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?

So much has to do with going beyond treating black people as cosmetic and symbolic items, as opposed to genuine personalities and human beings. And that is a deep moral and spiritual issue, which can of course be backed up by Civil Rights Commissions which enforce the laws against any form of discrimination.

Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero.

I see some recurring themes: things that feel threaded together, some symbolic references, and songs about some of the big questions, like death. There are a lot of references to weather, too!

I'm not playing myself. It's a symbolic situation, where I want to introduce a fascist behind the table. I couldn't have had anybody else do that; for it to be successful, I had to do it myself.

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.

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.

Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.

If you have seen one of the temples at night, fully lighted, you know what an impressive sight that can be. The house of the Lord, bathed in light, standing out in the darkness, becomes symbolic of the power and the inspiration of the gospel of Jesus Christ standing as a beacon in a world that sinks ever further into spiritual darkness.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

"Airgela" is "Alegria" backwards and "Alegria" means "Joy" or "Happiness." This is a fundamental word in this film. It's very important. Symbolically "Alegria" is crucial word in the creation of this project. Although it wasn't present from the beginning, as we were working on the music it became symbolic.

People working at the arenas are not just depending on one or two concerts. I think it gives a symbolic boost, as well as those shows do bring down some monetary investments in the city.

The Birth-chart has to be understood as the archetype or seed-pattern of one's individual being - as the 'symbolic' form of one's individuality, and therefore also of one's destiny, for the two are identical.

While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there--patriarchal control of animals and of language.

Ancient traditions have long associated holy wells and springs as very special places of the Goddess or anima mundi: symbolic of the Great Mother and associated with birth, the feminine principle, the universal womb, the prima materia, the waters of fertility and refreshment and the fountain of life. The dreaming sites, as they are called, have also been associated with visions, healing, and other paranormal experiences. In ancient Greece, for example, there were more than three-hundred medical centers placed at water sources, where patients experienced healing.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

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.

Know verily that the purpose underlying all these symbolic terms and abstruse allusions, which emanate from the revealers of Gods holy cause, hath been to test and prove the peoples of the world; that thereby the earth of the pure and illuminated hearts may be known from the perishable and barren soil.

As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.

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.

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