SCHOLAR ISLAND
SYMBOL
DIA-BOLLEIN=to tear apart
SYM-BOLLEIN=to throw together
"The symbol is living and ever expanding."
J.C. Cooper
"A symbol has a life of its own. An escaped metaphor-escaped from the control of the total poem or philosophy in which it belongs-may be a poisonous thing."
C.S. Lewis
"Symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words."
C.S. Lewis
"The recovery of symbolism is the chance to rescue man from his cultural provincialism and, above all, from his
historical and existentialist relativism."
Mircea Eliade
"The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol-a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card."
G.K. Chesterton
The Defendant, 1901
"A symbol has character which is super-personal, binding and for its own part informative. It is an object of tacit understanding; anyone seeing the image knows what its meaning is. It expresses something real yet precedent to commonplace reality, something from the prehistoric past, a fragment of essential divinity. Inaudibly it says to us something which becomes reality; it is communication antecedent to intellect and logic, it seizes on the peculiar and extraordinary. Where that occurs, the phenomenon has become myth.
Robert Beer Rudiger
Unicorn: Myth and Reality
"Everything is worthy of notice, for everything can be interpreted."
Hermann Hesse
The Glass Bead Game
"The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform."
-Charles Baudelaire (1821-67)
"In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, come and double significance....In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched."
-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
Sartor Resartus
"In everything there is an unexplored element because we are prone by habit to use our eyes only in combination with the memory of what others before us have thought about the thing we are looking at. The most insignificant thing contains some little unknown element. We must find it."
Maupassant
"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond what you see beyond when you know."
Ernest Hemingway
I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, of half-consciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist."
Yeats
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Book: "Sacred Symbols" by Clare Gibson
Book: "Symbols of the Sacred" by Louis Dupre
Book: "The Migration of Symbols" by Count Goblet d' Alviella
Book: "1,000 Symbols: What Shapes Mean in Art and Myth" by Rowena Shepherd & Rupert Shepherd
Book: "Hidden Symbols In Art" by Sarah Carr-Gomm
Book: "The Symbolism of Color" by Faber Birren