#symbols

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. ↗

— Lewis Mumford

#biological #chief #city #convert #creativity

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#forgets #homo #homo sapiens #inventions #invents

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. ↗

— Mark Rothko

#antiquity #back #basic #because #eternal

The book of Revelation is written largely in symbols. ↗

— Joseph Franklin Rutherford

#largely #revelation #symbols #written

America's veterans and troops serving abroad today fought hard to preserve our red, white and blue, from the Revolutionary War to today's Global War Against Terrorism, and Congress' action today is appropriate for one of our most sacred symbols. ↗

— Bill Shuster

#action #against #america #appropriate #blue

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life. ↗

— Margot Asquith

#life #signposts #symbols

My yachts were, I suppose, outstanding status symbols. ↗

— Paul Getty

#outstanding #status #suppose #symbols #were

The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#nominalism #reality #symbols #art

As soon as we notice that certain types of event "like" to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a "science" of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what "likes" to occur with what. ↗

— M.L. von Franz

#jung #jungian #man-and-his-symbols #synchronicity #attitude

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#beauty #breakfast-of-champions #kurt-vonnegut #sometimes #symbol