Correspondences Quotes & Sayings

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up. — Sydney Smith

The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table ...
How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation - of on thing predictably standing for another - has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition. — Terry Eagleton

Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day. — Arthur Phillips

Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world. — Terry Tempest Williams

Working out that I am not Mizuko has been an important step towards feeling better. If I have hit on a moral, it is this: the body is our natural barrier. There were lines I should not have crossed, and I did so without permission. I was looking always for correspondences, but meaning is found through difference. — Olivia Sudjic

Now that I have smelled you, I can face you down. Even though my body is shaking, I can keep a place free from you. I can feel you running round in my head, you see, but all the doors are closed to you now. I can control the dark inside, which is where all darkness is. You have shown me that I am more than just a rat. If I am not more than a rat, I am nothing at all. — Terry Pratchett

When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man. — Herbert Hoover

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds. — J.G. Ballard

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. — Asti Hustvedt

I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also - I am so gratified to report - they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well. — S. Bear Bergman

Philosophy is the invention of the rich. — Vladimir Nabokov

You can't believe Russell Crowe is the same actor who won an Oscar one year ago for Gladiator. — Joel Siegel

Superficial parallels were drawn between the Church and the Nazi Party, with its emphasis on active involvement by every member. The women's auxiliary of the Party and the Hitler Youth were regarded by some as secular equivalents to the Church's Relief Society, MIA, and the Scouting programs. — Fawn M. Brodie

The water beneath the Temple was both actual and metaphorical, existing as springs and streams, as spiritual energy, and as a symbol of the receptive or lunar aspect of nature.

The meaning of that principle is too wide and elusive for it to be given any one name, so in the terminology of ancient science it was given a number, 1,080. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666.

These two numbers, which have an approximate golden-section relationship of 1:1.62, were at the root of the alchemical formula that expressed the supreme purpose of the Temple. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. Not merely was it used to generate energy from fusion of atmospheric and terrestrial currents, but it also served to combine in harmony all the correspondences of those forces on every level of creation. — John Michell

But the only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel. I believe that one result of the emerging Experience Economy will be a longing for authenticity. To the extent that the church stages worldly experiences, it will lose its effectiveness. — Skye Jethani

I am one of the crucified dead. — William Henry Moody

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies. — Charles Baudelaire

I have always hated flying. I mainly pass the time writing letters. I am very old school and I still keep many correspondences the old-fashioned way, via post. — Vaginal Davis

If you are working with people with whom you do NOT do your best work, you are out of integrity. — Michael Port

All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence. — Emanuel Swedenborg

We cannot underestimate the power of the different art forms, and the correspondences between them, which are an unending source of inspiration and enrichment. — Helene Grimaud

The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you're lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures." "I'm not — M.R. Carey

The world of "magick" is, nine times out of ten, a world where people can hide their deep-set insecurity and personal damage behind illusion, constructed identities and claims to privileged knowledge, power or spiritual status. A gaudy carnival magic show, conducted with props that have long since begun to disintegrate with age, that seems to function only to distract people from the real magic that is occurring all around them, in every facet of their lives, every day of their lives. While the rituals and magical techniques of the Temple seem overly simplistic in comparison with the loftier Qabalahs, tables of correspondences and secret formulae of "high" magick, they have one thing which high magick quite often forgets: a concrete function. — Jason Louv

We should not imagine that this means our fate is fixed by our planets, however. Even though each vital organ corresponds to a planet - the liver to Jupiter, the brain to the moon, the heart to the sun, the spleen to Saturn, the lungs to Mercury, the gallbladder to Mars, and the kidneys to Venus - yet the one is not governed by the other: "Saturn has nothing to do with the spleen, nor the spleen anything to do with Saturn." Rather, these correspondences are simply a manifestation of the cosmic mirror that makes man a microcosm of the universal macrocosm. The two are analogs but are not causally related. From a scale model of a building you can read the proportions and relationships of the building itself, but crushing the former does not raze the latter. — Philip Ball

This day I see that pretty much all my correspondences are love letters. — Mary Anne Radmacher

As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form - or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. — Salman Rushdie

Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them. — Octavio Paz

EPILOGUE THE ASCENT BECKONS The — Cassandra Clare

But I have a gut feeling on this and it's not the oh-look-it's-a-bright-shiny-world kind. (Tate) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Perfect preservation isn't life, it's death. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience, finds in nature the 'correspondences' through which we may know our boundless selves. — Kathleen Raine

Stupidity is the result of a complete absence of imagination, silliness of its excess — Martin Boyd

Another quality of salt is that it remains hidden even though it adds flavor to a dish. People praise a dish by appreciating the quality of its grains or vegetables or spices, but no one says, 'The salt in this dish was fabulous!' Like salt, true yogis serve without wanting recognition or praise. They are happy to give credit to others and interested simply in doing their best to give pleasure to the Divine and benefit others. — Swami Radhanath

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves. — Michael Leunig

As the natural world is one of the effects whose causes are in the spiritual world, and whose ends are in the Divine, it is impossible to understand the meaning of one link without having regard to the complete chain. — John Daniel