#symbols

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

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#images #mass-media #reflection #symbols #television

The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe. ↗

— Karl Pearson

#apparently #carried #dealing #description #endless

The absence of symbols in our life debases it as much as any government can... ↗

— Joséphin Péladan

#symbols #life

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#life #looking-back #past #path #symbols

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

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

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better. ↗

— John B. S. Haldane

#arousing #better #description #emotion #fact

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#fiction #germans #holocaust #nazis #signs-and-symbols