I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.
— Johnny Cash
Courageous Symbolic Meaning quotations
Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
The symbol in Chinese for crisis is made up of two ideographs: one means danger, the other means opportunity. This symbol is a reminder that we can choose to turn a crisis into an opportunity or into a negative experience.
People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.
You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us.
They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness.
We have the power of the Holy Cross, our holy symbol, the divine grace of Christ, only as long as we have the holy marking of the Holy Baptism, meaning we have denied the devil and sided with Christ, and received the Holy Marking, the seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit.
Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.
The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of the Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficent and independent power.
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey.
The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.
A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes.
Status symbols mean nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.
All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression;
all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation.
… The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry; and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.
Secondly, figures, the symbols of numerical magnitude, are frequently also the symbols of operations, as when they are the indices of powers. Wherever terms have a shifting meaning, independent sets of considerations are liable to become complicated together, and reasoning and results are frequently falsified.
Aikido can be summed up like this: True victory is self-victory;
let that day arrive quickly! (True victory) means unflinching courage; (self-victory) symbolizes unflagging effort; and (let that day arrive quickly) represents the glorious moment of triumph in the here and now.
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.
The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you.
It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
But even in the Christian religion, much of its real meaning is hidden by words that are misleading and symbols that but few understand.
In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.
To grasp life and meaning, we assume constancy where it does not exist.
We name experiences, emotions, and subjective states and assume that what is named is as enduring as its name. Human beings blessed and cursed with consciousness - especially consciousness of their own being - think in terms of names, words, symbols.
In the 20th century, the position of the monarch as head of the Church of England was given a meaning which it never had before. You took the fact that the monarch was head of the Church of England to mean that the British monarchy was itself a religious or moral institution and the monarchy became a symbol of national public morality.
Nourishing spirituality means cultivating the inward space, the basis of which all things can be brought together. It means overwhelming deadness and stagnation and living reality in terms of values, inspiration, and symbols of higher meaning.
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
If I can mean to people - if I can symbolize the ability to pursue gender equality, racial equality, and to be truthful about our experiences, then, absolutely, that's what I want to be.
I look in the mirror and I don't see a sex symbol.
I just see a guy who looks like he's been beaten with a baseball bat. I mean, is this the face of a sex symbol? They say that because I work in the movies.
My name, Paloma, means 'dove' in Spanish. It stands as a symbol of peace and purity.
My intention was to grapple with the metaphysical meaning behind Scheherazade and present that meaning in its essence. Scheherazade is the symbol of the savior. She weaves tales not to save her own life, but to save humanity from its unending retributive response to injury.
The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.
Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small.
Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching†and waiting for us.
...What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature." It has become a symbol now.... That is the way human beings deal with the world.
To me, every dirty act was simply a sacrament of sin, a passionately religious protest against Christianity, which was for me the symbol of all vileness, meanness, treachery, falsehood and oppression.