Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“I have to be seen to be believed.”
― Queen Elizabeth II

“While I do not advocate burning the flag, I do encourage displaying it upside down as a symbol of a nation in distress.”
― Steven Magee

“We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“America’s animal association is the eagle, which is supposed to represent FREEDOM. But it turns out that America is 100% fake and the exact opposite of FREE, so perhaps we’d have been better off making our symbol the duck.”
― Jarod Kintz, Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world

“Very good. I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?”
― Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan

“Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogous or abbreviated expression of a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as an intentional paraphrase or transmogrification of a known thing is allegoric. The interpretation of the cross as a symbol of divine love is semiotic, because “divine loveâ€� describes the fact to be expressed better and more aptly than a cross, which can have many other meanings. On the other hand, an interpretation of the cross is symbolic when it puts the cross beyond all conceivable explanations, regarding it as expressing an as yet unknown and incomprehensible fact of a mystical or transcendent, i.e., psychological, nature, which simply finds itself most appropriately represented in the cross.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

“So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is the expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance”
― C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

“Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Engaging the mandorla can free us from the paralysis of polarity and the myopia it generates.”
― Mark M Beckwith, Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Prejudices, Paradigms, and Party Lines

“To wipe darkness off the century,
What can be the gifts
Brighter than letters ?”
― Geeta Tripathee

“The sign for Wittgenstein partakes of a logical dimension that cannot simply be taken in through an act of Hilbertian immediate perceptual apprehension that is prior to all thought or language. To put this dimension of Wittgenstein's teaching in our earlier Kantian idiom: an employment of language in which no symbol is to be recognized in the sign - so that we're confronted with the occurrence of a mere sign - involved a kind of exercise of our linguistic capacity whose very possibility presupposes the prior capacity successfully to employ signs as the sensibly perceptible aspects of symbols. In this area of philosophy - as in some of the others explored earlier in these replies - contemporary philosophers are prone to assume that the order of logical priority must be the other way around. They are inclined, with Hilbert, to regard the (to borrow Kant's term) problematic mode of occurrence of the sign as the logically simpler phenomenon and the comparatively less problematic case as the product of an enhancement of the 'mere sign' - an enhancement that breathes life into a sort of something that is, regarded in and of itself, logically mute and inert.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Here is another way of putting an aspect of that same parallel: just as The Critique of Pure Reason seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of an object presuppose a form of synthesis that belongs to the understanding, so, too, the Tractatus seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of the identity of a sign presupposes linguistic self-consciousness of the logical nexus of the symbol. Just as Kant seeks to show how, on the one hand, the understanding must bear on sensibility in order to have content (for it to represent anything), and how, on the other, the sensible manifold requires conferral of unity through the activity of the understanding to be more than merely blind (for it to amount to more than mere sensory noise); so, too, later Wittgenstein aims to show how, on the one hand, the symbol must find expression in the sign to be more than nothing (for it to say anything), and how, on the other, the form of the sign (in spoken language—its phonological form) presupposes the apprehension of its real possibilities for symbolizing (its logico-grammatical uses in acts of speech) in order for it to come into view as having the form that it does.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Each sign was stamped with the rabbit symbol, hastily and sloppily, so white ink ran down and mixed with the red paint on the wood. It made a rather pretty shade of pink, if you didn't pay attention to the meaning.”
― Liz Braswell, Unbirthday

“But this is no longer a photograph and, liter-ally speaking, it is no longer even an image. These shots may be said, rather, to be part of the murder of the image. That murder is being perpetrated continually by all the images that accumulate in series, in 'thematic' sequences, which illustrate the same event ad nauseam, which think they are accumulating, but are, in fact, cancelling each other out, till they reach the zero degree of information.
There is a violence done to the world in this way, but there is also a violence done to the image, to the sovereignty of images. Now, an image has to be sovereign; it has to have its own symbolic space. If they are living images- 'aesthetic' quality is not at issue here- they ensure the existence of that symbolic space by eliminating an infinite number of other spaces from it. There is a perpetual rivalry between (true) images. But it is exactly the opposite today with the digital, where the parade of images resembles the sequencing of the genome.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

“If you are a symbol consider your path because others will criticize you for the smallest thing.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“Luke tells us that Jesus cast the devil out of a boy who repeatedly threw himself into fire and water to destroy himself. Of all the unfortunates in the New Testament we are, perhaps, least likely to see ourselves in this boy. Yet he is the best symbol for us: we too continually plunge ourselves into all sorts of nonsense and engage in a diversity of dangerous and self-destructive beliefs and practices. This unfortunate is Everyman. He shows us truth: of our selves we are lost—Jesus only can save us.”
― Jean-Michel Hansen

“The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle's-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt's Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The 'Orient' figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of 'instantaneous electric connection' where 'mythical and symbolic thinking.' which once formed 'spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,' would no longer be needed.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“At a biological level we are born individuals: we are each a distinct organism. But at the symbolic level, we have to fight to carve out a distinctive identity in a space of shared words and ideas.”
― Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization

“The hieroglyphic sign of the cross, a symbol of the name which contains all names, image of the four cardinal points of the squaring the circle (or circular movement of the square), embodies and represents all the philosophy and all the theology of the Qabalah.”
― Éliphas Lévi, The Mysteries of the Qabalah: or Occult Agreement of the Two Testaments

“The use of pictures, designs, words, and music to communicate thoughts and ideas is surely one of the most unique of all human behaviors.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Every tattoo radiates an overall
energy frequency, and its individual
elements such as color, size, shape, and symbology radiate their own energies as well. Learning about these individual elements of tattoos is empowering, as you can use this important knowledge to construct a better car, bake a tastier cake, or win more games,
so to speak.

When we see tattoos and art in general as dynamic energies radiating from their various elements, all art suddenly takes on considerably more value than just the personal meaning we attach to it.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“The presence of gods has been enormously comforting as we have continued to dutifully cross the stage of life, going about or daily tasks, yet knowing that Pale Death was waiting in the wings.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“To have been accompanied on life's journey by the symbolic and monumental props of the gods has been a continuing and reassuring source of solitude. Such props quiet the inner voices that whisper about the inevitable end of life's drama.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“Using the delicate cloth like a handkerchief to protect the brittle pages, she opened the first book she had unearthed: On Dragons.
"Oh, how wonderful!" she murmured to herself, gazing at the wildly colored illustrations of giant reptiles, winged and breathing fire.
The Chaucerian English was going to take some work to decipher. She would have to see what reference texts she could find in the collection to help her work out the captions, but for now, the pictures fascinated her.
The next page showed a silver-armored knight astride a galloping white steed. Armed with a lance, he was shown charging at the hideous, horned dragon that loomed over him, its black, batlike wings outstretched.
The knight in the picture had a winged ally of his own, however. In the sky above him hovered none other than St. Michael the Archangel again, her old friend from the duke's family chapel.
Come to think of it, she mused, wasn't that white Maltese cross on the little knight's pennant another detail she had noticed in the chapel?
She turned the page and stopped at the next colorful picture of a dragon holding its egg in its claws. Some sort of curious symbol was depicted inside the rounded contours of the egg. Kate furrowed her brow and leaned closer, studying the symbol on the dragon's egg. A tingle of faint recognition ran down her spine.
I've seen this before.
The symbol showed an eight-spoked wagon wheel, with a flaming torch in the center. Beneath the wheel was the Latin motto, Non serviam.
Easy enough to translate: "I will not serve.”
― Gaelen Foley, My Dangerous Duke

“Resurgence above all odds being proud of it is a leadership symbol.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Modified Leadership

“Certainly, language must have been present for all of the 'behavioural modernism' of the last 50,000 years, as many such behaviours involve the types of symbolism that require explanation and storytelling.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The sacred Urubamba River snakes its way through the verdant tapestry, a lifeline that nurtures the land and the spirits that dwell within. In this sacred space, time becomes fluid, the boundaries between past and present dissolving. I find myself once again tracing the footsteps of the Inca, their energy palpable in every stone, every carved symbol that adorns the sacred structures.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Days

“Die Sonne rückt näher zum Horizont, und ich werde wieder an das mächtige Symbol erinnert, das ein Sonnenuntergang hervorrufen kann. Das Ende des Tages markiert einen weiteren Anfang, und so ist jedes Ende selbst ein neuer Anfang. Der endlose Zyklus von Sonne und Mond!”
― Ryan Gelpke, Die Howl Gang Legende