Quotes & Sayings About Symbolic

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. — Steven Johnson

Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism. — Ralph Nader

Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one. — Hermann Hesse

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world
not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. — Joseph Campbell

Let them all come,' said the Commdor, expansively. 'A symbolic friendly union of our nations. It will give us a chance for further friendly discussion. But one thing.' his face lengthened and grew stern, 'none of your religion. Don't think that all this is an entering wedge for the missionaries.'
'Commdor,' said Mallow, dryly, 'I give you my word that religion would cut my profits. — Isaac Asimov

I know. But I hate weddings."
"Because of Darcy?"
"Because a wedding is a ceremony where a symbolic virgin surrounded by women in ugly dresses marries a hungover groom accompanied by
friends he hasn't seen in years but made them show up anyway. After that, there's a reception where the guests are held hostage for two hours with
nothing to eat except lukewarm chicken winglets or those weird coated almonds, and the DJ tries to brainwash everyone into doing the electric
slide and the Macarena, which some drunk idiots always go for. The only good part about a wedding is the free booze."
"Can you say that again?" Sam asked. "Because I might want to write it down and use it as part of my speech. — Lisa Kleypas

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can. — G.K. Chesterton

To me, there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut, sent up as assistant to a series of computers, found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule, man is still in charge. — Adlai Stevenson

It seems symbolic of this all-pervading unpredictability that those engaged in the perfection of the means of destruction have finally brought about a level of technical development where their aim, namely warfare, is on the point of disappearing altogether. — Hanna Arendt

Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic. — Haruki Murakami

the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes. — Lawrence J. Vale

Iconic clothing has been secularized ... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent. — Angela Carter

We'll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified - they're small and going to die, after all - — David Foster Wallace

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense ... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are. — Richard Avedon

The main reason we were close and worked in the way we did was that it was a collaboration that was based on more than just the traditional view of design," Ive says. "We both perceived objects in our environment, and people, and organizational structures intuitively in the same way. Beauty can be conceptual, it can be symbolic, it can stand as testament to progress and what humankind has managed to achieve in the last fifteen years. In that sense, it could represent progress, or it could be something as trivial as the machined face on a screw. That's why we got on well, 'cause we both thought that way. If my contribution was simply to the shapes of things, we wouldn't have spent so much time together. It makes no sense that the CEO of a company this size would spend nearly every lunchtime and big chunks of the afternoon with somebody who just was preoccupied with form. — Brent Schlender

The NT brain learns to categorize and direct incoming signals. NT's "catch" what comes at them; this deadens the impact. The act of deadening or filtering stimuli is called "symbolic filtering" (a term developed for this book). Symbolic filtering converts real world stimuli into an internal symbolic representation of the real world. When the external world is taken in as words, it is physically painless. — Ian Ford

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic. — Anais Nin

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

What an amazing creative way to magnify, and illuminate the courage of 30 Sheroes whose courage, leadership and character is symbolic of the many unsung Women Sheroes of past and present. — Emory Douglas

What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to entertain ourselves. — Neil Postman

A suit is just a suit: a practical garment, not a ceremonial robe; it can be worn out to dinner with friends or for a visit to an art gallery. Its beauty and craftsmanship are utterly wasted if you think of it as something magical and symbolic. — Russell Smith

I firmly believe that intuitive or symbolic sight is not a gift but a skill -
a skill based in self-esteem. — Caroline Myss

I think guns are just a symbolic substitute for male genitalia, and I'm okay in that respect." "Fine. If they get in the house, you can whack them with your genitals. — J.A. Konrath

Only citizens familiar with their city as both symbolic and practical territory, able to come together on foot and accustomed to walking about their city, can revolt. Few remember that "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" is listed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, along with freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion, as critical to a democracy. — Rebecca Solnit

When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy. — Eric Ries

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general. — Stephen Wolfram

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age ... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy,intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder ... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. — Oscar Wilde

Morgan and Catcher said their manly hellos - consisting of a symbolic head bob from Catcher (of the "You're in my lair now" variety) and a responding nod from Morgan (of the "You are clearly the king of this castle" variety). — Chloe Neill

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. But this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance: Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams. — C. G. Jung

Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet. — Dean Cavanagh

In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value. — Jean Baudrillard

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself. — Bertrand Russell

Look who's calling the cauldron black."
"Kettle. It's a kettle. Get your metaphors right."
"That wasn't a metaphor. It was a, you know ... " He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that's symbolic of another thing. But isn't the same thing. Just like it."
"You mean a metaphor?"
"No! It's like a story ... like ... a proverb! That's it."
"I'm pretty sure that wasn't a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy."
"I don't think so. — Richelle Mead

Today's terrorists are pursuing a distinct route. They are increasingly attacking civilians in symbolic targets, such as those of economic importance, or venues of bustling life like public transportation or entertainment, like nightclubs. — Cliff Stearns

The emotional brain is highly attuned to symbolic meanings and to the mode Freud called the 'primary process' - the messages of metaphor, story, myth, the arts. — Daniel Goleman

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene. — Sam Lipsyte

My dear woman, our greatest problem is
that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water) — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Keep something in front of you Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it's symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for. — Joel Osteen

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. — George Santayana

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors. — Joseph Campbell

Writers, and the battery of critics, scholars, and publishers supporting them, would ignore or deny the commercial and symbolic interests which drive them, so involved are they in the literary game, and so accepting are they of its unspoken rules and premises (what Bourdieu calls the field's illusio). — John R.W. Speller

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them - who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait. — Margaret Atwood

The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action
which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous ... and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy. — Hunter S. Thompson

One cannot understate the importance of eliminating Bin Laden. He was a symbolic head of the organisation and, as we now know, an operational head of the organisation. — Eric Holder

It's somehow symbolic of Hollywood that Tara was just a facade, with no rooms inside. — David O. Selznick

When I walked into the room, I looked down to the floor and saw that each and every garment I owned had been pulled from its rightful place and had been meticulously sliced into countless pieces. One thing was painfully obvious to me: these clothes were symbolic of me; they represented my body.
What you really wanted was to slice me into countless pieces. — Rasmenia Massoud

Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society. — Alexander Downer

The brain is not neutral; it is not a general-purpose device. It comes with a structure, and our understanding of the world is limited to what our brains can make sense of. Some of our thought is literal- framing our experience directly. But much of it is metaphoric and symbolic, structuring our experience indirectly but no less powerfully. Some of our mechanisms of understanding are the same around the world. But many are not, not even in our own country and culture. — George Lakoff

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate. — Paul Tillich

Something can be symbolic without being a mere stand-in or vessel, which just brings us away from the true mystery and dread, into some boring version of what we already know. So what you say is true, in that the bear is a kind of parallel to the speaker, or imagined as such, but also very different. So if it's a symbol it is - ahem - a polysemous one. — Matthew Zapruder

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

Creation was given to people as a clean window through which the light of God could shine into people's souls. Sun and moon, night and day, rain, sea, the crops, the flowering tree, all these things were transparent. They spoke to people not of themselves but only of Him who made them. Nature was symbolic. But the progressive degradation of humans led them further and further from this truth. Nature became opaque. — Thomas Merton

...anyone who willingly turns their life upside down by becoming a cook is totally insane to begin with. So many chefs that I have met are dyslexic and totally not school people or intellectuals. That could be symbolic of the kind of lifestyle that they choose to live. They all drink a lot, do a lot of drugs, drink a shitload of coffee and espresso. They don't sleep much, and obviously don't have much of a life outside the kitchen. A cook's friend is a cook, there isn't much time for a non-cook friend or girlfriend. And time really isn't the issue so much as it's a lifestyle and a culture that is very hard to understand or identify with unless you are on the inside. Cooks hang out with cooks because there is nobody else awake, hungry and totally wired at 2am on a Tuesday. — Jennifer Topper

So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines. — Libba Bray

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary. — Jacques Lacan

Perhaps for many Japanese, autobiographical fiction writing is life. We are a people expected to complement, to harmonize, to anticipate one another's needs. All without a single spoken clue.

And the reason is that he's in training to be a writer. Observing detail, understanding irony, interpreting motivation. Hiro knows that acts are symbolic. The hard sour fruit offered too soon in its season carries a message. He has made an error in the timing of his visit. He has inconvenienced that family.

This is the Japanese way. Cogitating on inner meaning. Revealing ourselves and perceiving others through carefully crafted scenes.

Writing our endless I-stories. — Lydia Minatoya

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture. — Tom Robbins

Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.' I — Max Porter

Live Below the Line raises real money to help the world's poorest people, but it is also a symbolic demonstration aimed at highlighting - not replicating - the plight of the world's poor. — Hugh Evans

Well ... " He leans across the basket to place the necklace over my head. It falls in line atop my key. He drags my hair free, smoothing the strands to cover both chains. "I thought this could be symbolic. It's made of the same kind of metal, looks vintage like the key. Together, they prove what I've always known. Even when we used to come here as kids." "And what's that?" I watch him, intrigued by how the tunnel's opening tints one side of his smooth complexion with bluish light. "That only you have the key to open my heart. — A.G. Howard

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yet all myths are symbolic of some truth," she pointed out, "else they would not endure the ages. — Melissa McPhail

I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president. — Aaron Sorkin

As a matter of fact, no one is more tiresome than the person who can understand only realism in art. It shows a rather low artistic mentality never to believe anything you see unless it appears to be real. One must be willing to allow that symbolic things also mirror realities and sometimes provide greater esthetic pleasure than the merely realistic. — Aaron Copland

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force. — Slavoj Zizek

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. — Henry Louis Gates

2. The Book of Revelation. Does the book of Revelation give us a blueprint of coming world turmoil (the futurist position)? Or have some of the events in Revelation already taken place throughout church history, with some still to come (the historicist or historical approach)? Or does Revelation report events that were current at the time of writing but are now completed (the preterist view)? Or does Revelation speak in a timeless, symbolic way of the life of the church between the comings of Christ (the symbolic or idealist view)? Or is some combination — Robert L. Plummer

He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams. — Loren Eiseley

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. — Kenneth Burke

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. — Haruki Murakami

Aside from recurrance, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity. — Mark Z. Danielewski

After fifteen years of facing them (pitchers) you don't really get over them. They're devious. They're the only players in the game allowed to cheat. They throw illegal pitches and they sneak foreign substances on the ball. They can inflict pain whenever they wish. And, they're the only ones on the diamond who have high ground. That's symbolic. You know what they tell you in a war - 'take the high ground first.' — Richie Ashburn

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

The belief that myths are somehow less true than the symbolic dream we call 'reality' may be the greatest myth of all. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery. — Jean Cocteau

Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express cultural conflict or even social protest. — Kim Chernin

Here above the farms and ranches of the Great Plains aviation lives up to the promise that inspired dreamers through the ages. Here you are truly separate from the earth, at least for a little while, removed from the cares and concerns that occupy you on the ground. This separation from the earth is more than symbolic, more than a physical removal-it has an emotional dimension as tangible as the wood, fabric, and steel that has transported you aloft. — Stephen Coonts

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist. — Anish Kapoor

It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects ... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple. — Anatol Rapoport

I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their mythology. — C. G. Jung

In public discourse, the challenge is not to stifle robust debate, but rather to make sure that it is real debate. The first obligation for Christians is to listen carefully to opponents and if they are not willing to do so, then Christians should simply be silent. To engage in a war of words is to engage in a symbolic violence that is fundamentally at odds with the gospel. And too often, on such hot button issues as poverty, abortion, race relations, and homosexuality, the poor, children, minorities, and gays are used as weapons in ideological warfare. This too is an expression of instrumentalization.16 — James Davison Hunter

When he had ended, the holy hermit was a moment silent, then said: My son, I have attended to thy story and I know the maiden. I have myself seen her, as have many. Know, then, that she is capricious for she imposeth conditions that man cannot fulfill, and delinquency is punished by desertion. She cometh only when unsought, and will not be questioned. One manifestation of curiosity, one sign of doubt, one expression of misgiving, and she is away! — Ambrose Bierce

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. — Camille Paglia

The turn away from the BlackBerry and toward the iPhone is a reckoning with our essential nature and how we currently process, deploy, and enjoy symbolic communication. — Virginia Heffernan

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. — Ezra Pound

The ultimate goal of Jungian psychotherapy is to make the symbolic process conscious — Edward F Edinger

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work. — Thom Mayne

Physical experience is the translation of phenomena into symbolic language, and the law is the creation of the wind or a symbol. — Fulton J. Sheen

The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation. — Leo Strauss

In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [ ... ] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects. — S.I. Hayakawa

The cost to Tata of purchasing Land Rover and Jaguar may have been small, but its wider symbolic significance is enormous. — Martin Jacques

The desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom. Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory of sensations. To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application on a large scale. And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was reasonable. — Joseph Conrad

You know what's kind of funny? Well, not funny, but ironic, maybe? She's been here nine months now, and it takes nine months to create life. It's like she's been reborn. And the fact that tomorrow you turn eighteen is just another piece of it. It feels like right now is the start of something, like we're at the beginning and not the finish line."
Dominic started to walk away but paused after a few steps, his brow furrowed. "Actually, I don't think that's what irony is. Haven would probably correct me again and say I was being symbolic. — J.M. Darhower

Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When I set out from the boy's attic window, my head was so full of competing plans and complex stratagems that I didn't look where I was going and flew straight into a chimney.
Something symbolic in that. It's what fake freedom does for you. — Jonathan Stroud

We have become so quick and effective in building things today. It would be easy to build another Pyramid of Giza or another Great Wall. But these buildings haven't withstood the test of time because of their building quality. They stand tall because they have a symbolic value, they represent a culture. — Zhang Xin

An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson. — Alain De Botton

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