Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Allegory. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Allegory Quotes And Sayings by 97 Authors including Confucius,Neville Goddard,Rene Girard,Steve Turner,Annie Dillard for you to enjoy and share.
Heaven sends down its good and evil symbols and wise men act accordingly.
Fools exploit the world; the wise transfigure it.
The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.
If chance be the Father of all flesh,
Disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
And when you hear
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
When man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because.
Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat.
The man who has perceived God looks upon all types of men as dream motion-picture images, made of the relativities of the light of Cosmic Consciousness and the shadows of delusion.
Ideas and creeds are represented as unheeding stones as the ends of human longing.
Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.
For we never have naked and empty symbols, except when our ingratitude and wickedness hinder the working of divine beneficence.
God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.
Life's metaphors are God's instructions.
Dead metaphors make strong idols.
The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.
All is clouded by desire: as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust ...Through these it blinds the soul.
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil.
Persecution inspires men who otherwise would have remained dormant. As pain whips the painter, his brush whips the canvas.
The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.
They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.
In a world grown dark with deceit there there are many who are blinded and few who can hold up a light so that we can see the way. More important, so that we can look at ourselves, as well as others, and know how similar we are to the herd.
The Enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance, and sown the tares of spiritual errors.
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ...
What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.
..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which sometimes does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes.
In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life, there is a deafening alleluia rising from the souls of those who weep, and of those who weep with those who weep. If you watch, you will see The hand of God putting the stars back in their skies one by one.
The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.
One of the deepest motives (as you are aware) in the human beast (so deep that many have failed to detect it) is Alliteration.
When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.
Humanity surges with uncontrolled passion, is tumultuous with ungoverned grief, is blown about by anxiety and doubt only the wise man, only he whose thoughts
The few of understanding, vision rare, Who veiled not from the herd their hearts, but tried, Poor generous fools, to lay their feelings bare, Them have men always burnt and crucified.
The Diabolical sometimes assumes the aspect of the Good, or even embodies itself completely in its form. If this remains concealedfrom me, I am of course defeated, for this Good is more tempting than the genuine Good.
Art is the clothing of a revelation
Confession is a sacred rite enhanced by allegory, exaggeration, and lies.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
The knowledge of evil tempteth to its commission.
[I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.
By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.
Now all is dashed wrong; by the fool's craving to hear evil of self, that haunts some people like a demon!
Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.
Sometimes humans hit on a moment of profundity more complete than their dim minds could comprehend, and they took that nugget of truth and dumped it in the refuse for the bards and the poets to find, and mangle into yodeling paeans of love.
Darkness is the fit hour for beasts of prey, and ignorance the natural dwelling place of cruelty.
I've always found allegories kind of comforting. When you encounter people named Liar and Abstinence, you might not be crazy about them, but you know exactly what you're getting into.
When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the "suspension of disbelief" and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.
Metaphor, everything is sort of Metaphor of something else.
Secrets and Malice
All unquiet things,
which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs
In the vision of Enoch, we find ourselves drawn to a God who prevents all the pain He can, assumes all the suffering He can, and weeps over the misery He can neither prevent nor assume.
When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New.
Reason is often the slave of sin; it strives to justify it.
My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings.
For I thought there was a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown. On this theme the mind can reason to a point, a dead, impassable wall; arrived there, all that remains is to stand and cry aloud for help.
Purging trial, fidelities through storm, perseverance through mediocrities, and pursuit of Divine destiny through the allurements of earth.
When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.
Sometimes, Grace throws you and your 'world' into the washing machine, full spin, so that the fearful and controlling tendency is compelled to offer itself to the Totality - to the will and dance of the Cosmos.
The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with "God": the unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called "man" against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him.
God makes all chosen souls pass through a fearful time of poverty, misery, and nothingness. He desires to destroy in them gradually all the help and confidence they derive from themselves so that He may be their sole source of support, their confidence, their hope, their only resource.
Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.
All things at last yield to the silent, irresistible, all conquering energy of purpose.
And as the morning steals upon the night, melting the darkness, so their rising senses begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle their clearer reason.
Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw.
When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men's souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Anger and just rebuke, and judgment given,
That brought into this world a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
Death's harbinger.
Art hath an enemy call'd ignorance .
There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my "evil eye" for this world, which is also my "evil ear"..
No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation.
shows how fruitful analogies can be - not in proving points but in illustrating them, showing spiritual truths by means of material images.
What we choose to set our gaze upon is often a reflection of the idolatry in our heart.
The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God.
As fire is covered by smoke, mirror by dust, and embryo by amnion, so is knowledge covered by desire.
Perverse mankind! whose wills, created free, Charge all their woes on absolute degree; All to the dooming gods their guilt translate, And follies are miscall'd the crimes of fate.
Self-appearing subjects and objects are the power of the baseless ultimate truth.
When men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
When a man is made up wholly of the dove, without the least grain of the serpent in his composition, he becomes ridiculous in many circumstances of life, and very often discredits his best actions.
We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.
The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind ...
A little allegory of the soul - wherever it hides, God will find it.
A narrow vision is divisive, a broad vision expansive. But a divine vision is all-inclusive.
To some men it is hard seeing a call of God through difficulties; when if it would but clothe itself with a few carnal advantages, how apparent it is to them! They can see it through a little cranny.
The motive of man depicts his soul.
The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts
It is self-love and its offspring self-deception, which shut the gates of heaven, and lead men, as if in a delicious dream, to hell.
Men are not generally sufficiently aware of the distinction between the law of God and his purpose; they are apt to suppose, that as the temper of the sinner is contrary to the one, so the outrages of the sinner are able to defeat the other; than which nothing can be more false.
Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world, because The Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, I know. I know.
When vision fails Direction is lost. When direction is lost Purpose may be forgotten. When purpose is forgotten Emotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone, Destruction ... destruction. F
Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions
The heart desires, the hand refrains. The Godhead fires, the soul attains.
When we allow our fears and insecurities to blind us momentarily, we're often tempted to make the gate narrower than God does.
These people walk by a window deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual" But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story.
When to mischief mortals bend their will, how soon they find it instruments of ill.
Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
To unmask the deceit of every instinct for preservation is to procure salvation for humanity in nothingness ... Nothingness must be defined as the absense of all willing.
Reason! how many eyes hast thou to see evils, and how dim, nay, blind, thou art in preventing them.