We're actors β we're the opposite of people!
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.
Mortal minds are always unsettled by eternal things; they want to catch the infinite and nail it down to something finite. Impossible!
Every Valentine's Day, the student council sponsered a holiday fundraiser by selling roses that would be delievered in class. The roses came in four colors:white, yellow, red, pink, and the subtleties of thier meaning were parsed and analyzed by the female population to no end. Mimi had always understood it thus:white for love, yellow for friendship, red for passion, and pink for a secret crush.
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.
Plants are the ultimate symbols of life.
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Some symbols reach to your primordial archives.
Traces of the same spiritual concepts and symbolism that enlighten the Egyptian texts are found all around the world among cultures that we can be certain were never in direct contact. Straightforward diffusion from one to the other is therefore not the answer, and 'coincidence' doesn't even begin to account for the level of detail in the similarities. The best explanation, in my view, is that we're looking at a legacy, shared worldwide, passed down from a single, remotely ancient source.
The same principles that make a spiral galaxy also create the structure of a seashell and unfurling of a fern. This is why ancient spiritual people used natural symbols to convey universal concepts.
The verge between sea and land marked the manifestation of the symbolic transition between the known and the unknown. Between life and death, spirit and mind, between an unlimited host of elements and forces contrary yet locked together. Lives were given to the seas, treasures were flung into their depths. And, upon the waters themselves, ships and their crews were dragged into the deep time and again.
Sorry,β Wakefield insists, βbut what exactly is cultural imperialism?β The boy turns his good eye to Wakefield. βThat when Indian kids play with Mickey Mouse instead of kachinas. Kachinas mean something to their people. The Mouse means nothing.β βHe must mean something,β Wakefield says. βYeah, he means money. A Kachina tells the story of the earth, of the people, of dances, rituals, how to make rainβ¦ Talk to the fucking mouse and see what he tells you.
We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.
The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.