The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)

by Dan Brown

Symbologists often remarked that France—a country renowned for machismo, womanizing, and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon and Pepin the Short—could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a thousand-foot phallus.

As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads. Nowadays, few people realized that the four-year schedule of modern Olympic Games still followed the cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the five-pointed star had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified at the last moment—its

five points exchanged for five intersecting rings to better reflect the games’ spirit of inclusion and harmony.

As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?’ ” He smiled. “By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.”

“men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.

Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.”