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

“Taj Mahal is not just a monument, but a symbol of love.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“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

“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

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

“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

“There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of progress.

One class lives to the utility of the symbol, as the majority of men do, regarding health and wealth as the chief good. Another class live about this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet and artist and the sensual school in philosophy. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified and these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third spiritual perception.

I see in society the neophytes of all these classes, the class especially of young men who in their best knowledge of the sign have a misgiving that there is yet an unattained substance and they grope and sigh and aspire long in dissatisfaction, the sand-blind adorers of the symbol meantime chirping and scoffing and trampling them down. I see moreover that the perfect man - one to a millennium - if so many, traverses the whole scale and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty; and lastly wears it lightly as a robe which he can easily throw off, for he sees the reality and divine splendor of the inmost nature bursting through each chink and cranny.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II: 1836-1838

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

“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

“Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us. To look at it in such a way that we understand what need it fulfills, and in what kind of world.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Despite water is a symbol of calm and beauty، but if you are not stronger than it، you can't cut it.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“The profound symbolism of the eye [is] as the bridge between the light you can see and the light that burns within you.”
― Suzanne Giesemann, The Awakened Way: Making the Shift to a Divinely Guided Life

“I've been in headlines across the United States and across the world, I've been named personally in anti-trans legislation. I've been honored by top LGBTQ organizations, I've been painted as a hero, as a villain, as a symbol, as a representative for an issue that has taken center stage in the culture wars. But when people are busy turning you into a symbol, they forget what you really are: a human being. A person with needs and desires, fears and hopes just like everyone else. At the end of the day, I'm just a girl with a dream. A girl with so much love in her heart.
And all I want, all I've ever wanted, is the freedom to run.”
― CeCé Telfer, Make It Count: My Fight to Become the First Transgender Olympic Runner