#symbols

If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I locked the door of her cell behind me? That would be like saying that the writing of this book, over which I have labored for so many watches, will vanish in a blur of vermillion when I close it for the last time and dispatch it to the eternal library maintained by the old Ultan. The great question then, that I pondered as I watched the floating island with longing eyes and chafed at my bonds and cursed the hetman in my heart, is that of determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last. ↗

— Gene Wolfe

#symbols #text #love

I came hoping to see those eyes, but instead I return with my heart, leaving behind only flowers. ↗

— Kim Dong Hwa

#flowers #love #symbols #unrequited-love #unrequited-love

Jewelry and pins have been worn throughout history as symbols of power, sending messages. Interestingly enough, it was mostly men who wore the jewelry in various times, and obviously crowns were part of signals that were being sent throughout history by people of rank. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#being #crowns #enough #history #interestingly

Every democracy is constructed day-to-day. And the electoral process reduces and minimalizes every single aspect of human complexity. We're putting it into pamphlets. We're doing a publicity show. We're becoming symbols. ↗

— Gael Garcia Bernal

#becoming #complexity #constructed #day-to-day #democracy

Sometimes a symbol holds more power than the thing it represents. Like the symbol for Thing, the one I created that is confusing and abstract and makes people ask, What is that thing? And I always reply, “If you already knew, why did you ask? ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #power #symbols #funny

The crack in your heart allows light in. ~ GOOD FORTUNE page 238 ↗

— Leslie Bratspis

#chinese-wisdom #compassion #inner-wisdom #life-lessons #meditation

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 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

The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary… ↗

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

#symbols #imagination