Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Symbolism. 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 Symbolism Quotes And Sayings by 93 Authors including Philip Pullman,Evelyn Underhill,Carl Jung,Sigmund Freud,S. Kelley Harrell for you to enjoy and share.

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Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.
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The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.
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The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.
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After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
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Symbols are miracles we have recorded into language.
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Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
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Symbols are the language of something invisible spoken in the visible world.
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Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.
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Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.
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The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.
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The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.
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Symbolic forms have always been the supports of civilizations, their laws, and their morality. Since symbolic forms are illusions, and illusions sustain civilization, those who rule must maintain illusion.
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We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
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A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.
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You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.
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that his gesture was symbolic, as Serena said. But symbolic of
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I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.
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Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.
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A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.
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We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
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Creative thought seems prone to flower in symbols before it ripens to fruit.
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A symbol is best answered by a symbol. Not by a . . . meat cleaver.
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Nothing has meaning, only the meaning you give it.
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The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of the Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficent and independent power.
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Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams.
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The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.
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A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.
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Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
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Realities disguised as symbols are, for me, new realities that are immeasurably preferable. I make an effort to take them at their word. To grasp, to carry out the diktat of images to the letter.
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Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
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People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.
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Symbols shmimbols. Sure they're important but ... Well look at Ahab's whale. Now there's a great symbol. Some say it stands for god, meaning, and purpose. Others say it stands for purposelessness and the void. But what we sometimes forget is that Ahab's whale was also just a whale.
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If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.
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All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.
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All our knowledge is symbolic.
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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.
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Humans have invented all kinds of symbols to communicate not only with other humans but more importantly with ourselves.
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The Word is symbol of delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and the back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.
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[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
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Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.
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Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
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Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.
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It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!
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Nothing has meaning except for the meaning you give it.
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The book of Revelation is written largely in symbols.
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I think of my photographs as being obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious.
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Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
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I cannot now think symbols less
than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by
the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the
poet, the musician, and the artist.
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Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
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It is commonplace to talk as if the world "has" meaning, to ask what "is" the meaning of a phrase, a gesture, a painting, a contract. Yet when thought about, it is clear that events are devoid of meaning until someone assigns it to them.
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The lives of the poor are rich in symbols.
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From time immemorial, symbolism and poetry have been inseparable. Like a pirate and his rum.
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Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.
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Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
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the all too human need to conjure symbolic meaning from meaningless events.
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Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special.
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Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.
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Metaphors are a window into the soul and carry us across the boundary between the lower and higher selves, connecting us to the universal energy field and the collective consciousness.
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There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.
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My favorite symbols were those which I didn't understand.
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Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
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I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.
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A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.
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When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.
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I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?
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Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
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Words and laws in this world made place for signs and symbols.
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Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.
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In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
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For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense.
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No symbols where none intended.
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This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.
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Significance is sweet ...
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Divine symbols which have been given to mankind from time to time speak to that forum of truth which is within our hearts, and waken our consciousness to divine ideas entirely beyond words.
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We attach meaning to things, and things to meaning: endow them one way or another as if to prove to ourselves that we are who we are; this life really happened; we really have traveled this far in time and space.
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Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.
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Who rules our symbols, rules us.
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Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.
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It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting. There may be a time when this symbol means something treacherous and terrible, rather than something noble and literate.
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I am a symbol of my soul.
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In this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.
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Traditional symbolism assumes that the celestial is primordial and that the terrestrial is but a reflection or image of it: the higher contains the meaning of the lower.
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As human beings, we seek meaning in everything. We're so good at discovering patterns that we see them where they don't exist.
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It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.
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Remember, Shaw, that the power of the dagger lies not only in the visual, but also the symbolic.
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Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing. There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.
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Even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning. a hidden meaning.
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The gift of intuition may bless you with powerful symbols that convey feelings, energy and emotions beyond what words could ever express.
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I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.
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It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.
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This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.
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The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
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The language of images [of inner-oriented artists] does not follow a code structure that is evident and widely accepted, but is more likely to be a complex of symbols that have a profound meaning for the artists themselves.
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Superficially insignificant or accidental looking detail (in art) may well carry the most important unconscious symbolism.
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Always remember: My general theme is 'There is no message.' There never has been. Stop trying to find the message or the meaning in everything. That's. My. Theme.
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In essence, it is not what it looks like but what it does that defines a symbol.
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Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet.
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It is war now, and armies need symbols.
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Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there, because the job of reading is not to understand the authors intend. The job of reading is to see into other people as we see ourselves.