A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

Ambrose Bierce

Quote Author

Ambrose Bierce
American - Journalist
June 24, 1842 - 1914

Guests stay where you've put them, and carry on doing whatever you suggested they do, until you suggest they stop and do something else. If you leave them drinking a cup of tea and looking through your holiday slides, they're supposed to sit tight till you ask them to come and string beans in your kitchen.

Anne Fine

Something is swelling up among our athletes. Many of them are frustrated, everywhere in the world, and they are looking for a way out. Either they start doping themselves, or they give up the sport. Or else they stand up and demand that those who have the power to should change the system.

Travis Tygart

You cannot avoid making judgements but you can become more conscious of the way in which you make them. This is critically important because once we judge someone or something we tend to stop thinking about them or it.

Neil Postman

We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become "the paper made of human meat," we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play.

Kim Hyesoon

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I try to study the background of the country I am in and what were my hits there, so I can at least give them some of what they want. It's like a wedding - give them something old, something new, something borrowed and definitely something blue!

Betty Wright

And you realise you're doing a public service in making people happy - as a musician you can give people something a doctor, a lawyer, a politician cannot give them that. It's not scientific. It's spiritual - a good feeling. And although you don't know them personally, the audience are like your friends.

Billy Ocean

If you try to stop all these teams and players celebrating with the fans, some of them taking their shirts off, it is part of the game and something you cannot stop. It is something important, even if sometimes you get fined.

Marco Silva

When you love someone, truly love them, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt-you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it’s crippling-like having your heart carved out.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.

Katherine Paterson

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

Margaret George

Sometimes the mere connection we make with each other can change people's lives. It doesn't have to be something big. The mere fact that you're interested in them makes them happy.

Chath Piersath

Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.

George Orwell

It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

Pablo Picasso

Here in Georgia, we continue to grapple with our own vestiges of hate. The image carved into Stone Mountain, like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant reminders of racism, intolerance, and division.