#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

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life. ↗

— Margot Asquith

#life #signposts #symbols

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

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

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

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

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