Top 452 Symbolic Quotes & Sayings

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Everybody in Hollywood loves symbolic gestures.

I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist

Clothes are incredibly symbolic.

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic - purely symbolic - move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

I detest symbolic protest, as it is an outcry of weak, middle-of-the-road, liberal eunuchs. If an individual feels strongly enough about something to do something about it, then he shouldn't prostitute himself by doing something symbolic. He should get out and do something real.

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

People's most prized possessions carry deeply symbolic and emotional significance.

The ultimate goal of Jungian psychotherapy is to make the symbolic process conscious

The color red is symbolic of passion and action, so this Vajrayogini, as she's called, comes with a mantra and she comes with these various weapons and accouterments that are all symbolic of the kind of activity that this principle, as it were, this psychological principle, does or activates in the world. And there's text and mantra as well.

Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.

People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.

A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.

There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.

It's always great to have things from France at a wedding. It's symbolic of style, of culture, of taste.

Marriage is absolutely something that's important to me. It's the ultimate symbolic step in love.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.

The sharing of food is like breaking bread, it's very symbolic.

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it's also a symbolic journey - a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.

It is no wonder that advocates of Obamacare blindly push forward with their agenda to force religious Americans to violate their own precepts: in the war between the state and the individual, religion is on the side of the individual and his or her relationship with God. That is why symbolic prayer matters. It is symbolic.

The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

I think of my photographs as being obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious.

[My poems] of course, it's symbolic, in the way that things in a poem can be - that is, pointing to something beyond its mere ordinary meaning, while also retaining all the qualities of that ordinary meaning. In other words, it's a bear, but it's also suggesting something else, just by virtue of the attention to it. But it's not "symbolic" in that way we are taught to think about things in poems.

Man is symbolic to the sun. The sun is dealing with a ball of fire and didn't go out yet. Me being symbolic to the sun, that's what keeps me going, that's like my hunger. That's like my fury, my self esteem. That's the elements within me that keep my body motionable. The fire is self esteem. Inner strength.

People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there--patriarchal control of animals and of language.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions

Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them.

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.

I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.

Cynicism is something which has become symbolic of imperial policy.

It's somehow symbolic of Hollywood that Tara was just a facade, with no rooms inside.

I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.

Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.

Every holiday has unique fare and symbolic foods, but none as much as Rosh Hashana.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life.

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.

If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces.. .It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.

A merely symbolic religion does not threaten the ruling regime of materialistic science.

If I had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.

When writing is good, everything is symbolic, but symbolic writing is seldom good.

As a whole, I am interested in the symbolic, rather than the literal use of the camera.

Steve Jobs now rests with the sublime satisfaction of symbolic immortality.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Everything can be linked together in some fashion, in either a physical, psychological, or symbolic manner.

The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

The good thing is that all the symbolic elements are gone, and that which really matters - the core - is left.

All our knowledge is symbolic.

Source truth exists in greater abundance outside of the symbolic system of words.