#symbols

The book of Revelation is written largely in symbols. ↗

— Joseph Franklin Rutherford

#largely #revelation #symbols #written

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

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

Instead of the word 'love' there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#symbols #love

The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#archetype #children #dreams #psychology #symbolism

They were in love! Carla wore her hair up and Andrew saw everything as a sign. They spent an entire afternoon sitting side by side in a coffee shop, taking more meaning than necessary from the world around them. A man wearing boxing gloves walked down the sidewalk in front of them and they took that to mean they would be together forever. ↗

— Amelia Gray

#signs #symbols #love

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

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