#symbols

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#religion #society #symbolism #symbols #men

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#myth #omens #symbols #death

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#columns #confused #emit #familiar #forests

My commitment to the Republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia... a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian. ↗

— Malcolm Turnbull

#australian #commitment #desire #love #movement

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning. ↗

— Jim Woodring

#charged #come #dreams #fish #hood

When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth. ↗

— William H. Hunt

#complete #enough #familiar #heavenly #images

All women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. ↗

— Megan Fox

#known #sex #symbols #women

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language. ↗

— Slobodan Milosevic

#countries #foreign #forget #history #language

Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers. ↗

— Marvin Minsky

#around #based #dan #numbers #problems

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors. ↗

— Jim Morrison

#each #generation #names #new #new people