Symbols Quotes

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

Martin Luther King Jr

Most of us have, in some area or other of our thinking, improper habits of evaluation. For this, society itself is to blame: most societies systematically encourage, concerning certain topics, the habitual confusion of symbols with things symbolized.

SI Hayakawa

Man's achievements rest on the use of symbols.

Korzybski

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin

Alan Watts

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Joyce Carol

Symbolism is the study of the part played in human affairs by language and symbols of all kinds, and especialy of their influence on Thought. It singles out for special inquiry the ways in which symbols help us and hinder us in reflecting on things.

Ogden & Richards

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.

Louis Aragon

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.

John Dewey

All things are symbols: the external shows of Nature have their image in the mindÖ

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

Alan Watts

I was surprised as anyone when T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets suddenly became symbols of rebellion. In the film there was a scene in which somebody asked my character, Johnny, what I was rebelling against, and I answered 'Whaddya got?' But none of us involved in the picture ever imagined that it would instigate or encourage youthful rebellion.

Marlon Brando

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Wynn Bullock

In Las Vegas, everything takes place as if the absence of any sense of belonging to the environment entailed a hypertrophied sensitivity to details. There is no possibility of visual escape into perceptual horizons of indeterminateness (left-right, forward-back, near-far), but, instead, only the pregnancy of enlarged, exaggerated and highlighted forms. Behind each lit-up sign no space is hollowed out, no incipient world. Everything is there, everything is flat. As thick as the giant advertising billboards that ubiquitously package it, loading it with nave and comic symbols, crude, schematic messages, Las Vegas is a city of literal superficiality.

BRUCE BEGOUT

Strategic communication is at the core of effective leadership. Through a leader's use of verbal and written symbols employees are motivated or deflated, informed or confused, productive or apathetic. A leader's ability to carve off the verbal fat and get to the meat of an issue, idea or plan will find success at every turn.

Reed Markham, PhD
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