Selected symbolism quotes

1. There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.

2. The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable.

3. Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered. Yet the names of Hillary and Tenzing went instantly into all languages as the names of heroes, partly because they really were men of heroic mold but chiefly because they represented so compellingly the spirit of their time.

4. What do we plant when we plant a tree? A thousand things that we daily see, We plant the spire that out-towers the crag, We plant the staff for our country's flag; We plant the shade from the hot sun free, We plant all these when we plant the tree.

5. We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady.

6. Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

7. Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

8. The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers - weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There's where the power lies.

9. If you buy the flag it's yours to burn.

10. Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.

11. When Freedom from her mountain-height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldric of the skies, And striped its pure, celestial white With streakings of the morning light. Flag of the free heart's hope and home! By angel hands to valour given! Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, And all thy hues were born in heaven. Forever float that standard sheet! Where breathes the foe but falls before us, With Freedom's soil beneath our feet, And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us?

12. There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.

13. I wanted to get an angel wings tatooed on my back, as a guardian thing.

14. Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

15. When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

16. Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

17. A man may climb Everest for himself, but at the summit he plants his country's flag.

18. When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality.

19. Let the black flower blossom as it may!

20. An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

21. A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

22. Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

23. The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

24. The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.

25. An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

26. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.

27. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

28. Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word 'water' is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

29. I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes. And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.

30. There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near;' And the white rose weeps, 'She is late;' The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear;' And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'

31. In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing 'unreal' is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

32. The blessed damozel lean'd out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters still'd at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven.

33. Still falls the Rain - Dark as the world of man, black as our loss - Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.

34. Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.

35. Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

36. The important question is, how many hands have I shaked?

37. The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign.

38. It upset me that, five days after the hurricane hit down in New Orleans, the President's plan was for a day of prayer. I would have thought a truck of food. A day of prayer. Now, maybe I'm mistaken here and, again, I'm not a scientific expert, but isn't a hurricane officially an act of God? Isn't a day of prayer kind of redundant? Hasn't God already made up his mind on that sort of thing? So we do a day of prayer. The President has his stupid day of prayer. Three days later, Hurricane Rita hits. Somebody must have said something... something like, 'is that all you got?'

39. So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ...

40. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

41. The development of relations between State and Church affords a very instructive example of how the carelessness of a single statesman can have after-effects which last for centuries. When Charlemagne was kneeling at prayer in St. Peter's, Rome, at Christmas in the year 800, the Pope, giving him no time to work out the possible effects of so symbolic an action, suddenly bent down and presto! popped a golden crown on his head! By permitting it, the Emperor delivered himself and his successors into the hands of a power which subjected the German Government and the German people to five hundred years of martyrdom.

42. The ending of the words is the Word Abrahadabra.

43. Incorrect symbolism... is bound to undermine any possibility of our building a structurally human civilization.

44. I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,' she [Gabrielle] said, 'why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough.

45. A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes!

46. He was tried in absentia, and hanged in effigy - but I can't find either of them on the map.

47. The battle to save life is still going on. Up till now Lao Chiu has already lived for forty-four days. He lives on stubbornly and endures all suffering. Already he has become a banner, a fresh red banner. Many people regard him as a source of encouragement and as a model for them. Many consider him as a personification of the noble qualities of the working class and as a shining example of the great spirit of communism. This battle to save life will eventually be won. The fact that Lao Chiu has lived until now is already a medical marvel. He has passed through one crisis after another and later he may face still more. But he will certainly live. Blind faith in established experience has been shattered, outmoded regulations have been smashed.

48. To the Fuhrer. This is the truth which bound me to thee: I looked for thee and found my Fatherland. I was a leaf floating in limitless space. Now thou art my homeland and my tree. How far would I be carried by the wind, wert thou not the strength that flows up from the roots. I believe in thee, for thou art the nation. I believe in Germany. For thou art Germany's son.

49. La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

50. Baudelaire is the great symbol of l'art pour l'art (art for the sake of art): sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose.

51. Poe with a cross, that's what you are, adored of the gangster age.

52. Hitler remained in his closely-guarded suite. It was long after midnight when he left the Imperial Hotel in the company of Heinrich Himmler to make the long-awaited visit to the Weltliche Schatzkammer to claim the Spear of Destiny as his own personal possession. Awaiting him at the Hofburg were Wolfram von Sievers, head of the Nazi Occult Bureau, Major Walter Buch, Nazi legal expert and chief of the USCHLA, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS Obergruppenfuhrer, Austria. All three, along with Reinhard Heydrich's Sicherheitspolizei, had played a separate role in helping to secure the Spear for him.

53. My paintings are allegories not portraits.

54. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

55. My command stands firm like mountains, and the sun's disk shines and spreads rays overy the titulary of my august person, and my falcon rises high above the kingly banner unto all eternity.

56. There was also Himmler the crusader and visionary, the man who built a romantic castle in a German forest where the knights of the S.S., many of whom could hardly read or write, were required to repair at intervals to contemplate the glory of their order and establish spiritual contact with the heroes of mediaeval Germany.

57. Back he'll come...With vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and confident.

58. O brave flag, O bright flag, O flag to lead the free! The glory of thy silver stars, Engrailed in blue above the bars Of red for courage, white for truth, Has brought the world a second youth And drawn a hundred million hearts to follow after thee.

59. Where is the G-ddamn f**king flag? I want the G-ddamn f**king flag up every f**king morning at f**king sunrise.

60. The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet - and breaks the heart.

61. I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. 'Who are you?' asks the knight. 'I am Death.' Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!' But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.

62. Everytime we got off the plane that day, three times they gave me the yellow roses of Texas. But in Dallas they gave me red roses. I thought how funny, red roses- so all the seat was full of blood and red roses.

63. And God smiled again, And the rainbow appeared, And curled itself around his shoulder.

64. We must not forget that the lizard and the snake are identified with the unconscious and with the forces of evil. There's something deep in human memory that responds strongly to snakes. Even if you've never seen one. I think that a snake just embodies everything that we fear.

65. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night Alive as you or me Says I, 'But Joe, you're ten years dead,' 'I never died,' says he.

66. The fine purple The purest gold The red of the Sacred Heart The grey of a ghost The 'L' of the lips are open To the 'O' of the Host The 'V' of the velvet The 'E' of my eye The eye in wonder The eye that sees The 'I' that loves you.

67. Her subjects come tripping from library shelves, television and cinema screens and musty books of fairy tales, the stuff that dreams are made of. She spins tunes that haunt, twist and turn the mind, triggering long forgotten moods. Listening intently to her albums is an experience akin to having a lucid and feverish dream. Jungian symbols of youth, innocence, spiritual escape and the dark, feminine realm abound. Ghosts haunt the black vinyl grooves... But it's not all brooding intensity. There are jokes, too...

68. In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.

69. Why did so many antique myths agree that hell was a circular place?

70. Mont Blanc is the Monarch of mountains; They crowned him long ago, On a throne of rocks - in a robe of clouds - With a Diadem of Snow.

71. With this salt I am shaking the foundations of the empire.

72. As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.

73. Knights of the Rosy Cross, they bore Its weight within the heart, but wore Without, devotion's sign in glistening ruby bright; The gall and vinegar they drank alone, But to the world at large would only own The wine of faith, sparkling with rosy light.

74. Coincidences, good and bad, contretemps, seals, ciphers, mottoes, omens, anniversaries, names, dreams, are all of a certain importance to her. Her letters are often dated on some marked anniversary of her own, or of her correspondent's calendar. She signalized saints' days, 'All-Souls,' and 'All-Saints,' by poems, which had for her a mystical value.

75. She chose the Sistrum for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time: 'In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me, on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but, midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her face that it was she, but refused to believe it.'

76. Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal - the symbol of medicine.

77. Heaven is blue, hell is red.

78. Tomas de Torquemada: 'It's better to lose your skullcap than your skull.'

79. The worm stood straight on God's blood-splattered threshold then and beat his drum, beat it again, and raised his throat: 'You've matched all well on earth, wine, women, bread, and song, but why, you Murderer, must you slay our children? Why?' God foamed with rage and raised his sword to pierce that throat, but his old copper sword, my lads, stuck at the bone. Then from his belt the worm drew his black-hilted sword, rushed up and slew that old decrepit god in heaven! And now, my gallant lads - I don't know when or how - that worm's god-slaying sword has fallen into my hands; I swear that from its topmost iron tip the blood still drips!

80. Take away that fool's bauble, the mace.

81. This day (to the stupendous and inscrutable Judgements of God) were the Carcasses of that arch-rebell Cromwell and Bradshaw the judge who condemned his Majestie & Ireton, son-in-law to the Usurper, dragged out of their superbe tombs (in Westminster among the Kings), to Tyburn & hanged on the Gallows there from 9 in the morning til 6 at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument, in a deepe pitt: Thousands of people who (who had seen them in all their pride and pompous insults) being spectators: look back at November 22, 1658, & be astonish'd - And fear God & honour the King, but meddle not with those who are given to change.

82. As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting. It is indeed the outdoor life - yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow. 'But none of this exists!' 'Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter.' Very subtle, very knowing in her naivete is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me.

83. ?uvre etrangement cerebrale, passionnante, inegale encore, mais jusque dans ses inegalites poignante et superbe. ?uvre douloureuse, car pour la comprendre, pour en ressentir le choc, il faut avoir soi-meme connu la douleur et l'ironie de la douleur, qui est le seuil du mystere. Parfois, elle s'eleve jusqu'a la hauteur d'un mystique acte de foi; parfois, elle s'efface et grimace dans les tenebres du doute. Et, toujours emane d'elle l'amer et violent arome des poisons de la chair. Il y a dans cette ?uvre un melange inquietant et savoureux de splendeur barbare, de liturgie catholique, de reverie indoue, d'imagerie gothique, de symbolisme obscur et subtil; il ya des realites apres et des vols eperdus de poesie, par ou Gauguin cree un art absolument personnel et tout nouveau; art de peintre et de poete, d'apotre et de demon, et qui angoisse.

84. Gauguin's work is symbolic, and he himself is a myth. He rejected the values of bourgeois society and of a machine civilization. His gesture had its sordid side, but retrospectively it seems to have been appropriate, coming at a time when the world was preparing for annihilating wars. It was not a useful example: we cannot all go and live on South Sea islands, and, as I have said before in this connection, modern man carries his civilization like a pack on his back, and cannot cast if off. But he can nevertheless protest against the burden, and state the real values of life. So Gauguin did, in paintings that are symbols of eternal truths, images of great beauty and serenity.

85. One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of color than Gauguin.

86. Republicans always pull down the shades though there is seldom a reason. Democrats never pull down the shades though they always should.

87. The monkeys stand for honesty, Giraffes are insincere, And the elephants are kindly but They're dumb. Orangutans are skeptical Of changes in their cages, And the zookeeper is very fond of rum.

88. Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse.

89. His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity - This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being.

90. This is Alberich's dream come true -- Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.

91. With hindsight, one can perhaps see that unachievable projects were the right monuments to an ideal. Because they were not built, they could not be destroyed.

92. You know you get that tattoo of a barbed wire now when you're 18 and by the time you're 80 it's a fucking picket fence.

93. Here is a symbol in which Many high tragic thoughts Watch their own eyes.

94. The images of Saddam Hussein endlessly repeated on our screens before the war (Saddam firing a rifle into the air) made him into some kind of Iraqi Charlton Heston-the president not only of Iraq, but also of the Iraqi Rifle Association. The true interest of these images, however, is that they remind us how the ideological struggle is fought out not only at the level of arguments but also at the level of images: which image will hegemonize a field, and function as the paradigmatic embodiment of an idea, a regime, a problem.

95. If your Television is broken, put my picture on it.

96. Ante paucos quam occideretur menses cornix in Capitolino elocuta est: ????? ????? ?????, nec defuit qui ostentum sic interpretaretur: Nuper Tarpeio quae sedit culmine cornix, 'Est bene' non potuit dicere, dixit: 'Erit.'

97. I don't think China will negotiate. I think they are waiting for the Dalai Lama to die... The Chinese government feels he symbolizes the entire independence movement, and when he is gone, it will go away.

98. Weave the warp, and weave the woof, The winding sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room and verge enough, The Characters of hell to trace.

99. Duly twice a morning Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water. At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore, Till at the length It grew a gallows, and did bear our son, It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant.

100. Each will have his personal Rocket.