Quotes about Symbolism

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.

The mere thought of divorce terrified me. To me, divorce symbolized failure.

Did you read the part that says, 'Your hair is like a flock of goats'? How romantic is that? Or that other line, 'Your neck is like the tower of David.' Oh, now, that sounds real attractive! If some guy tried those lines on me, I'm sure I'd fall instantly in love with him.

In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child's hobby-horse and trumpet.

Our mother had taught us that when the moon was white, reappearing after its absence, it was showing us that what had been hidden could easily become whole again.

Do you think your mother came back? Shelby asks him. Definitely. She's a cardinal who lives in my backyard.

For green is love and luck just as it is jealousy and envy

This room is very powerful: Buddha, golden, holding down one side; the primordial Great Mother, black, offering her bead of mitochondria holding down the other.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

If you have two loves of bread, sell one and buy a lily. The bread becomes a different thing when eaten at a table with the lily in the center.