Symbol Quotes

“The money you make is a symbol of the value you create.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?”
― Alex Flinn, Breathing Underwater

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate. ”
― Alan D. Wolfelt

“Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“The compass rose is nothing but a star with an infinite number of rays pointing in all directions.

It is the one true and perfect symbol of the universe.

And it is the one most accurate symbol of you.

Spread your arms in an embrace, throw your head back, and prepare to receive and send coordinates of being. For, at last you know—you are the navigator, the captain, and the ship.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“What if it becomes less about how we look and more about how much we care? What if it becomes less about how much money we earn and more about how much we share our good fortune? Imagine a world where who we are in our hearts is the ultimate status symbol.”
― Amy Leigh Mercree

“Every morning when I wake up, I kiss her forehead as symbol of gratitude and appreciation and she repays me back with a lovely smile.”
― M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry

“the difference between poets and mystics . . . The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”
― Graham Greene

“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn

“the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is within and through language that the human mind points to itself.”
― James N. Powell, The Tao of Symbols

“I use the chopsticks to outline the biggest heart possible. Then I use the Sweet'N Low packets to fill it in. I borrow some from two other tables when I run out.
When I'm done, I point to the heart on the table.
"This," I say, "is only about one ninety-millionth of how I feel about you."
She laughs.
"I'll try not to take it personally," she says.
"Take what personally?" I say. "You should take it very personally."
"The fact that you used artificial sweetener?"
I take a Sweet'N Low and fling it at her.
"Not everything is a symbol!" I shout.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.”
― Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century

“The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.”
― Freya Stark, East Is West

“No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.”
― George Steiner, Real Presences

“The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.”
― Arthur Edward Waite

“The green earth is a symbol of hope.
Walk on it like you are going somewhere, even when you are going nowhere.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“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

“The universal symbol of happiness is a smile.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Nothing Shakes The Smiling Heart

“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, MODI-fied LEADER-ship

“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