Symbolic Quotes
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Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.
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More Symbolic Quotes
Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
jacob bronowski— Science and Human Values, Part 2: "The Habit of Truth", §5 (1956, 1965, p. 35)
There haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. There’s been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
— Interview with The Root, July 21, 2009.
Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.
françois rabelais— Chapter 20 : How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song
This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper that bears his name upon it as well as mine: 'We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two people never to go to war with one another again.'
(Arthur) Neville Chamberlain— 1938 Speech on the signing of the Munich Agreement, Heston airport, 30 Sep.
When women breached the power structure in the 1980s two economies finally merged. Beauty was no longer just a symbolic form of currency: it literally became money.
Naomi Wolf— 1990 The Beauty Myth, ch.2 'Work'.
The trouble with "sacrifices as symbolic acts" is that the immediate impact on those for whom the sacrifice is made quickly fades, while the impact on those who actually make the sacrifice can go on and on.
preston manning— Chapter Fourteen, Conflict and Consolidation, p. 255
LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)... Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life.
john mccarthy— John McCarthy (1979) "History of Lisp," as quoted in: Avron Barr, Edward Feigenbaum. The Handbook of artificial intelligence, Volume 2. Addison-Wesley, 1986. p. 5
I detest symbolic protest, as it is an outcry of weak, middle-of-the-road, liberal eunuchs. If an individual feels strongly enough about something to do something about it, then he shouldn't prostitute himself by doing something symbolic. He should get out and do something real.
william powell— Chapter Two: "Electronics, Sabotage, and Surveillance", P.62
It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.
Anatol Rapoport— Rapoport (1969:40); As quoted in: Michael Parker Pearson, ?Colin Richards (2003) Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space. p. 49 : Commented on the theory of religious origin
The good thing is that all the symbolic elements are gone, and that which really matters – the core – is left.
anders fogh rasmussen— On the Lisbon Treaty, Jyllands-Posten, 25 June 2007
Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
Albert Camus— "Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka"
This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.... We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
neville chamberlain— Speech at Heston Airport (30 September 1938), quoted in The Times (1 October 1938) Oxford Book of Modern Quotes(pdf)
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
Richard Dawkins— Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb
The master never let a statement about God go unchallenged. All God statements were poetic or symbolic expressions of the Unknowable; people , however, foolishly took them as literal descriptions of the divine .
anthony de mello— p. 95 (One Minute Nonsense (1992))
By now you must have accepted the fact that your religion , in fact, none of the Earthly religions, truly knew what the afterlife would be. All made guesses, and then established these as articles of faith . Though, in a sense, some were near the mark, if you accept their revelations as symbolic .
philip josé farmer— Message of "The Visitor" Ch. 19
“The protections offered to private landowners are a lot like having the French on your side in war – largely symbolic."
david a. ridenour— National Center for Public Policy Research press release, July 26, 2005.Referring to the initial draft of an Endangered Species Act reform bill.
If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.
Harold Rosenberg— "What's New: Ritual Revolution" (p. 260)
Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. ...It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.
george sarton— Preface (A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959))
"Here you see the pattern from which my great work is derived. It expresses the symbolic significance of NULLITY to which TOTALITY must necessarily attach itself, by Kratinjae's Second Law of Cryptorrhoid Affinities, with which you are possibly familiar." "Not in every aspect," said Cugel.
jack vance— Chapter 4, "The Sorcerer Pharesm"
In Greece and a number of other countries it is customary to eat something on Good Friday to which vinegar is added, in memory of the vinegar that Christ was offered on the cross. To this good soup the vinegar adds a symbolic touch… Unlike [today] Good Friday, when it is to be found throughout Lent , the Hot Cross Bun was originally eaten only on Good Friday.
— Evelyn Birge Vitz (1991), in A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family and Faith ..., p.190
The aphorism is a mode of symbolic representation that belongs to an era dominated by highly individualized and introverted experience, atomistic thought and feelings, an absence of commonly accepted religious beliefs and moral standards and the general disintegration of traditional culture.
— Dalibor Vesely (2004), Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, p. 346
The whole tendency of empiricism and democracy in speech, dress and manners has been toward a plainness which is without symbolic significance. The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian
— Richard Weaver (1948) Ideas have Consequences. p. 160
A world view is a system of co-ordinates or a frame of reference in which everything presented to us by our diverse experiences can be placed. It is a symbolic system of representation that allows us to integrate everything we know about the world and ourselves into a global picture, one that illuminates reality as it is presented to us within a certain culture .
— Diederick Aerts et al. (1994) World views. From Fragmentation to Integration. p.8
[Kearney (1984) refers to worldview as] culturally organized macro-thought: those dynamically inter-related basic assumptions of a people that determine much of their behavior and decision making, as well as organizing much of their body of body of symbolic creations... and ethnophilosophy in general."
— Michael Kearney (1984) World view. p. 1; as cited in: Kenneth G. Tobin (1993) The practice of constructivism in science educaction. p. 58
In parts of Christian world , All Souls Day is celebrated by making complete meals for the dead , reflecting their preferences in life , and laid out on a table overnight. All of these symbolic food acts or ritual meals serve to maintain and ensure good relations between family and friends, the living and the dead.
— B. W. Higman, in How Food Made History, (8 August 2011)], p.1926
A symbol is always in general and, however precise its translation, an artist can restore to it only its movement: there is no word -for-word rendering. Moreover, nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
— Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Appendix: Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
— Ernest Becker, in Fear Of Death, Christianism.
The key institutions of Soviet power - though weakened, demoralized, and corrupted - were still there. symbolic of that reality and of the lingering hold of the Communist past was the historic centerpiece of Moscow: the continued presence of the Lenin mausoleum.
zbigniew brzezinski— Chapter 4, The Black Hole, p. 104
The fact that all Mathematics is symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of symbolic Logic itself.
bertrand russell— Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 5.
