Quotes & Sayings About Allegory

At this the duchess, laughing all the while, said: Sancho Panza is right in all he has said, and will be right in all he shall say ... — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I don't like allegory. — China Mieville

187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is.
Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it? — Maggie Nelson

Adelaide remembered the first storm Justinius had seen her through. She had seen many storms since then, some milder than others, some worse than the first, and the Prince had been with her, comforting her and protecting her life through each wail of the wind and each crash of thunder. If he could free her from the slave yard and get her through every violent storm with her life still intact, he'd see her through the transition into her palace home. — Valerie Howard

The artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost degree of the former! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals. — Margaret Atwood

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here ... — Richard Flanagan

By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language. — Carl Jung

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

A little allegory of the soul - wherever it hides, God will find it. — Eileen Atkins

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory. — Erwin Schrodinger

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job. — Susan Sontag

It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God ," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow. — Lionel Trilling

Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising 'Take two aspirins'? — Warren Buffett

No story can be devised by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted allegorically by the wit of some other man. — C.S. Lewis

But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims." A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry. — Matthew Arnold

When someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance. — Plato

The Durhannians' countenance lifted as is the way of Hope. There was a village elder whose eyes flickered with the light of Understanding. We knew he would soon be able to illuminate paths in the darkness. — Laurie Green Westlake

Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn't say is that voice belongs to HER. There's only one song to sing these days
Carol's song
and if you aren't in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up. — Joe Hill

You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small."
"Then what?" I ask.
"Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."
I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"
She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell. — Christina Baker Kline

She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model. — Douglas Rushkoff

A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. — George MacDonald

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories. — Stanley Kubrick

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. — William Butler Yeats

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. — Walter Benjamin

Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. — J.M. Coetzee

Freemasonry is 'veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols' because these are the surest way by which moral and ethical truths may be taught. It is not only with the brain and with the mind that the initiate must take Freemasonry but also with the heart. — Carl H. Claudy

I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag. — Margaret Atwood

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. — Herman Melville

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory. — John Kessel

The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The 'Bourne' movies are great in their own ways; it introduces a whole other sort of allegory about the Bush years. The secrecy and the threats of a big global organization. — Chris Terrio

An acquired taste, this dense Jabberwocky-ish word salad is a political allegory about a populace that's been pharmaceutically duped into believing its wretched world is wonderful. — Manohla Dargis

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer then the truth — Leah Wilson

For ... austere and gracious allegory, as for so much of its mysticism and its chivalry, its ardours and its endurances, the world is in debt to Spain. — Helen Waddell

'Ever seen a leaf - a leaf from a tree?' 'Yes.' I saw one recently - a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining ... ' 'What's this - an allegory?' No; why? Not an allegory - a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything's good.' — Fyodor Dostoevsky

All perishable is but an allegory. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

She reached down and picked a crab out of a bucket. As it came up it turned out that three more were hanging on to it. "A crab necklace?" giggled Juliet.
"Oh, that's crabs for you," said Verity, disentangling the ones who had hitched a ride. "thick as planks, the log of them. That's why you can keep them in a bucket wihtout a lid. Any that tries to get out gets pulled back. yes, as thick as planks. — Terry Pratchett

It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life. — Jocelyn Gibb

All is allegory ... Each creature is key to all other creatures. — J.M. Coetzee

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life, a life like the scriptures, figurative. — John Keats

What makes Jessica Jones series so unique is that it really is an allegory for many different types of abuse, whether it be sexual abuse, physical abuse, or psychological abuse. That's what makes this such an incredibly bold show. — Rachael Taylor

When they see beyond the sky,
When they know beyond the mind,
When they hear the song of the Burning Light;
Take these Gifts of My Outstretched Hand,
Weave them together.
I shall come. — Rachel Starr Thomson

Bentley mounted Silverwood, look down at his parents, and launched the powerful steed into the kingdom ... a kingdom waiting for one young knight to discover the truth of a Stranger. — Chuck Black

Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb. — Tom Robbins

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers. — Naguib Mahfouz

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

Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us? ... — John Geddes

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true. — Agnes Varda

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy. — Steven Pinker

There are no obstacles which our Savior's love cannot overcome. The High Places of victory and union with Christ can be reached by learning to accept, day by day, the actual conditions and tests permitted by God, by laying down of our own will and accepting His. The lessons of accepting and triumphing over evil, of becoming acquainted with grief, and pain, and of finding them transformed into something incomparably precious; these are the lessons of the allegory in this book. — Hannah Hurnard

Comparisons are like rigid fingers - eager to point at a subject but unwilling to grasp it. — Richelle E. Goodrich

He saw in Mr Chivery, with some astonishment, quite an Allegory of Silence, — Charles Dickens

Persons seeking to find scholarship herein will be sued; persons motivated to discover meaning will be exiled; persons seeking to find an allegory will be summarily ordained. — David Baldacci

Peruse all the sermons of Jesus and you will be sure to find parables, and sometimes allegory. What you will always find, however, is something of keeping our hearts in order. — Jerome Strong

I've always felt that the reality of life is best expressed through allegory that transcends ... well, the reality of life. Fantasy is the lens through which I make sense of the world. Plus, it's a lot more entertaining. — Brea Nicole Bond

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It's just the problem with those things, and what i've learnt is this: they're meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate ... thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It's meant to be: here's your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don't work that way, bro. You don't get the full benefit. You've got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can't just fly up to the branches. You get me? — Zadie Smith

Do Muslims believe the Quran to be God's "literal" word? Yes and No. Yes, in the sense that the Quran is seen as representing the exact words of the original text as revealed by God. And No, in the sense that the Quran is not a book that is devoid of metaphor and allegory. What would be more correct then is to say that Muslims believe the Quran to be "God's immutable word" because they believe it to be unchanging over time and unable to be changed. — Anonymous

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting. — Lydia Davis

The columns of the Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts, the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously — Edith Wharton

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. — C.S. Lewis

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory. — Theodor W. Adorno

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. — Herman Melville

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music. — Amos Oz

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

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life. — N. T. Wright

When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

There has to be the popcorn genre element, or I don't engage the same way. I like action and vehicle design and guns and computer graphics as much as I like allegory. It's a constant balancing game. I want audiences to be on this rollercoaster that fits the Hollywood mould, but I also want them to absorb my observations. — Neill Blomkamp

Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart. — Sylvia Plath

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended. — Herman Melville

A Mixed-breed Apple
A little mixed-breed apple,
half red, half yellow, tells this story.
A lover and beloved get separated.
Their being apart was one thing,
but they have opposite responses.
The lover feels pain and grows pale.
The beloved flushes and feels proud.
I am a thorn next to my master's rose.
We seem to be two, but we are not. — Rumi

If you look only as Genesis as an allegory, you have a major problem, because if it's an allegory, then tell me who our ancestor was? If Abraham was real, then from Abraham if Adam isn't real, if it's just an allegory, it's just a story, then what's the real Adam who really fell in a garden and really sinned? Where did we come from? — Ken Ham

The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. — Mark Twain

Masonry, according to the general acceptation of the term, is an art founded on the principles of geometry, and devoted to the service and convenience of mankind. But Freemasonry, embracing a wider range and having a nobler object in view, namely, the cultivation and improvement of the human mind, may with more propriety be called a science, inasmuch as, availing itself of the terms of the former, it inculcates the principles of the purest morality, though its lessons are for the most part veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. — William Howard Taft

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. — Augustine Of Hippo

She seemed to exist in a kind of allegory, and having these shapes about her, claimed my interest so strongly, that (as I have already remarked) I could not dismiss her from my recollection, do what I would.
'It would be a curious speculation' said I after some restless turns across and across the room, 'to imagine her in her future life holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild grotesque companions, the only pure, fresh, youthful object among the throng. — Charles Dickens

Everything for me becomes allegory. — Charles Baudelaire

N equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite ... — J.R.R. Tolkien

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Each character is an allegory for every aspect of human existence. — Vanna Bonta

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. — Haruki Murakami

When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience - an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me. — Hermann Hesse

V is like a mythical situation. It's an allegory for what could happen. V has philosophies within it that actually warn against things like that happening. — David Lloyd

Now, if the book of Genesis is an allegory, then sin is an allegory, the Fall is an allegory and the need for a Savior is an allegory - but if we are all descendants of an allegory, where does that leave us? It destroys the foundation of all Christian doctrine-it destroys the foundation of the gospel. — Ken Ham

I was the only boy in our school what had asthma," said the fat boy with a touch of pride. "And I've been wearing specs since I was three. — William Golding

Twelve dead?" I said. "Jesus. — Dennis Lehane

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story. — Neil Gaiman

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. — Cormac McCarthy

Allegory and metaphor work by linking together two normally unconnected ideas in order to startle the reader into seeing something they thought they knew in a different light. Strictly speaking metaphors aren't coincidences, as they are man-made, but they work the same trick: fusing unrelated entities to power a revelation. — Martin Plimmer

A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

A novel is not an allegory ... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. — Azar Nafisi

On the Day of Judgment , life and death are not determined by the world but by God's wisdom and law — John Bunyan

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. — C.S. Lewis

When confronted with a clear definition of what it is to be Mexican, we encounter ourselves in a never ending allegory of mixes and chaos. — Gael Garcia Bernal

What is more, as J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us in his great essay on Beowulf, there is a danger that attends rational and scientific description: "a plain pure fairy story dragon" can be ruined at the hands of a logical analysis. The interpreter, "unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. — Gregory Alan Thornbury