Allegorical Quotes & Sayings

Allegorical Fall As we know from the remarks at the beginning of this present work and spread throughout, even in antiquity not all believers thought the Bible was entirely historical. Speaking of Philo's allegorical interpretation of the fall of mankind as found in Genesis, for example, Geddes recounted a list of others in antiquity who understood biblical tales as cosmological and allegorical, not literal: — D.M. Murdock

A metaphorical weight lifted from his allegorical chest and Artemis Fowl felt himself again. — Eoin Colfer

It was an allegorical, metaphorical, rhetorical question. — Billy Phillips

It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical. — Hilary Mantel

Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge. — Annie Besant

Allegorical stories of saints battling with giants, monsters and demons may be interpreted as symbolizing the Christian's fight against paganism. At Bwlch Rhiwfelen (Denbigh) St Collen fought and killed a cannibal giantess, afterwards washing away the blood-stains in a well later known as Ffynnon Gollen. In Ireland, the tales of saints slaying giant serpents may have the same meaning; alternatively they (or some of them) may refer to early sightings of genuine water monsters. St Barry banished a serpent from a mountain into Lough Lagan (Roscommon), and a holy well sprang up where the saint's knee touched the ground. — Colin Bord

I didn't intentionally emplace the raw material needed for political/allegorical readings into any of the first drafts, but sooner or later I saw it coming, and I did intentionally not cut it from some of the final drafts. In other words, I'm not particularly interested in encouraging readers to read certain stories that way, but I want to make sure that route's accessible should anyone be so inclined. — Roy Kesey

one might argue that the Mandeville author's original deception was not a simple trick for its own sake, but rather that it allowed him the freedom to speak his mind in a society that did not encourage such expression: to critique the moral state of his fellow Christians through an unusually open-minded presentation of the sectarian Christian and non-Christian world beyond Latin Christendom,2 an open-mindedness extended to nearly every group except the Jews and some nomads like the Bedouins. If so, the deception can be considered akin to the sort of literary device used by his near contemporary, William Langland, who, to obtain similar critical freedom, couched his impassioned critique of Christendom in an allegorical dream vision called Piers Plowman (five of whose some fifty surviving copies are bound with TBJM, suggesting that they have concerns in common).3 — Iain Macleod Higgins

Nowhere in Chaucer do we find what can be called a radically allegorical poem. — C.S. Lewis

French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I've ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head. — Sarah Vowell

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways. — Reza Aslan

This is what I'm king of: a whirling mass of humans who either hate me or ignore me. — Beth Revis

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film - and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level - but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. — Stanley Kubrick

In saying that the truth is both said and not said by the philosopher (said and not said in the form of stammering), Aristotle was still close to the methods of interpretation used by grammarians in their commentaries on the poets. Symbolic or allegorical methods pointing out what was deliberately hidden by Homer behind the figure of Nestor or Ulysses.

But there is a difference however - and a crucial one - which is that for Aristotle the equivocation of the said and the not-said, this distance without gap which means that the truth is both hidden and present in the philosopher's words, this light that is shadow, is not the effect of an oracular kind of intentional secret or prudent reserve. If philosophers do not speak the truth, this is not because their indulgence wishes to protect men from its terrible face; it is because they lack a certain knowledge (savoir). — Michel Foucault

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality. — Peter Straub

Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings? — Russell Brand

We are all the spirit sons and daughters of a loving God who is our Father. We are part of His family. He is not a father in some allegorical or poetic sense. He is literally the Father of our spirits. He cares for each one of us. Though this world has a way of diminishing and demeaning men and women, the reality is we are all of royal, divine lineage. In that unprecedented appearance of the Father and the Son in the Sacred Grove, the very first word spoken by the Father of us all was the personal name of Joseph. Such is our Father's personal relationship with each of us. He knows our names and yearns for us to become worthy to return to live with Him. — M. Russell Ballard

The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war *is* glorious after all. — George Orwell

To me the Mahabharata is a profoundly religious book, largely allegorical, in a way meant to be a historical record. — Mahatma Gandhi

But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches. — William Robertson Smith

Silence is one of many forms of prayer. — Y.I. Lee

His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical. He possessed what I call an eschatological imagination, one that could envision putting ideas into action and then following them out to their ultimate consequences. At the same time, his characters respond to such consequences according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu, and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky's novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding in social life. — Joseph Frank

If you're going to be a healer, it's not enough to read books and learn allegorical stories. you need to get your feet wet, get some clinical experience under your belt. — Andrew Schneider

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor. — China Mieville

Leo had once joked about writing an allegorical sketch where Parody packed its bags, shut up shop and put a sign on the door which read: "Closed. Any inquiries please contact the Real". — Patrick McGuinness

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the representation of time itself changed; it moved away from allegorical human figures - an old man, a blind youth holding an hourglass, a woman with bared breasts representing Fate - to the impersonal language of numbers: railroad schedules, the bottom line of industrial progress. Time was no longer shifting sand; time was money. Yet the modern era also allowed for multiple conceptions of time and made the experience of time more individual and creative. — Svetlana Boym

Irony is the kid who steals music and is stolen by the music. — MEDVGNO

The universe, then, is God, of whom the popular gods are manifestations; while legends and myths are allegorical. The soul of man is thus an emanation from the godhead, into whom it will eventually be re-absorbed. — Marcus Aurelius

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about. — Flannery O'Connor

Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological. — Jon Meacham

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion?
A.Indeed I do think that I do.
Q.Such as what?
A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole. — Tennessee Williams

As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image. — Craig Owens

Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification. — Joan Didion

Now whatever the origin of this apparently meaningless jumble of ideas may have been, it is really a perfect and very slightly allegorical expression of the actual present views we hold today. — Frederick Soddy

In a letter, once, he drew me a picture, or allegorical diagram, imitated from the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, which showed a Leviathan of human values. In the head there stood a figure labeled SAINT. In the heart, a figure labeled HERO. Twittering round the huge figure there was an insect-like object dressed as a man of fashion of the seventeenth century and labeled GENTLEMAN; from its mouth there issued a balloon in which was written in tiny letters: 'and where do I come in?'. Mirabel, he went on to say, was no part of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase of Blake's that he had his own meaning for. Perhaps the hunger for magnitude that made him admire Gilgamesh and the Edda, and made Spenser and Milton his favourites, disabled him from an appreciation, which I could not deny, for a world of elegant cuckoldry and cynic wit, so seemingly heartless, a trifler's scum of humanity that sought to be taken for its cream. — Jocelyn Gibb

The paths people choose in life can lead to the creation or destruction of people, places, things, and relationships. The future is uncertain, but what is certain is there will be change. — Stephen Black

Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The enlightened rational man is not unlike the title character in Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni": a likeable rake, intelligent and enterprising, free to do as he pleases, outmaneuvering his honorable, tradition-bound adversaries at every step. One cannot begrudge him his liberty and pursuit of happiness, but looming large above him is his fatal flaw: his mind's maturity does not match his freedom. His pursuits are frivolous, tawdry and destructive. And this, we maintain, is the historical moment of our techno-scientific world: like some allegorical alien race in a science fiction story, we have placed broad freedoms and enormous power in the hands of a flawed creature: ourselves. Empirical reason has brought us here, and by its light we will have to find a way forward. — Danko Antolovic

The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I woke up, smiling to myself at this dream with its allegorical aspects but with no real meaning. — Jean De Berg

Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden. — Heather Paxson

At its best, SF cinema is an allegorical site that invites the audience to safely examine and reflect on long-standing social issues in an unfamiliar setting, providing the possibility of viewing them in a new light. At its worst, the process of allegorical displacement invites audiences to affirm racist ideas, confirm racial fears, and reinforce dubious generalizations about race and the place of African Americans in U.S. society without employing overt racial language or explicit imagery. — Adilifu Nama

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory
a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth. — Luigi Pirandello

If you listen repeatedly to religious speech, after enough repetitions you will actually begin to notice God and His works where there was just chaotic life going on before. What was formerly chance becomes a miracle. What was pain is now karma. What was human nature is now sin. And regardless of whether these religious memes are presented as Truth or as allegorical mythology, you're conditioned just the same. — Richard Brodie

When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical. — Barbet Schroeder

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it. — Terence McKenna

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life. — Gilles Neret

For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts. There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models to be found and of what tales are you speaking - how shall we answer him? I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but founders of a State: now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business. Very — Plato

No, it's not [a book] Lana. It's an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, IT SUCKS. — Sterling Archer

Whenever you find a preacher who takes the Bible allegorically and figuratively ... that preacher is preaching an allegorical gospel which is no gospel. I thank God for a literal Christ, for a literal salvation. There is literal sorrow, literal death, literal Hell, and, thank God, there is a literal Heaven. — J. Frank Norris

I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world. — Samuel Johnson

Philo of Alexandria introduced in the first century what has been described as the 'Hellenizing of the Old Testament,' or the allegorical method of exegesis. By this, as Erdmann observes, the Bible narrative was found to contain a deeper, and particularly an allegorical interpretation, in addition to its literal interpretation; this was not conscious disingenuousness but a natural mode of amalgamating the Greek philosophic with the Hebraic doctrines. — Philo

Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings. That — Augustine Of Hippo

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'. — William Golding

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible. — Christopher Langan

IT HAS BEEN SHOWN that the story of Moses and the Exodus can be understood not as literal history or history mythologized but as myth historicized. The lawgiver motif ranks as solar and allegorical, reflecting an ancient archetype extant also in the myth of Dionysus, god of vine and wine, who shares numerous significant attributes with Moses. — D.M. Murdock

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.) — C.S. Lewis

Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century. — John Kessel

Most people, he suggested, are not capable of exercising reason. God created scripture for the unreasoning masses. He intended the Qur'an to be read in one of two ways. The learned, the falsafah, read it allegorically. 'Anyone who is not a man of learning', however, 'is obliged to take these passages in their apparent meaning.' 'Allegorical interpretation' of the Qur'an is, for the masses, Ibn Rushd suggested, the same as 'unbelief because it leads to unbelief'. — Kenan Malik

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don't make it. So I tried to make it more refined. I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn't want to say or didn't want to show or I was not able to find how to show. — Agnes Varda

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill - the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. — Thomas Henry Huxley