Symbolist Quotes & Sayings

The challenges on your journey can either be a distractions or opportunities. Don't allow the challenges to distract your vision. With positive mind-set, you can turn them into wonderful opportunities. — Lailah Gifty Akita

We mean to say that Symbolism and Decadence - the negative attitude to which is indisputable to everyone except the "participants" - are genetically connected with everything brilliant and sublime created by the "unbound personality" during this period of time, from the Renaissance up to the development of electrical engineering; contrariwise, the border which they cannot cross is laid down where man understood that he was always "bound." The great continent of history, the continent of real deeds, practical needs, and more than all that, of received religion and the established Church - that is whose shore this stinking monster can never crawl into, that is where we are fleeing to from it, that is where man can always save himself. Where the monastery wall rises this surge of the faithless waves of history - no matter how strong it may become and how far it may spread around - will stop and fall back.

("On Symbolists & Decadence") — Vasily Rozanov

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist. — Henry Adams

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us."
"Who?" Lily asked.
"Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me." — Bebe Moore Campbell

From sunset she appeared,

Her cloak pierced by a bloom

Of unfamiliar climes.


She summoned me somewhere

Into the northern gloom

And aimless winter ice.


And bonfire burned 'mid night,

And with its tongues the blaze

Did lick the very skies.


The eyes flashed fiery light,

And falling as black snakes

The tresses were released.


And then the snakes encircled

My mind and lofty spirit

Lay spread upon the cross.


And in the snowdust's swirl

To black eyes I am true,

To beauty of the coils.

(untitled: "From sunset she appeared") — Alexander Blok

Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence. — Vasily Rozanov

The religion of this 'I', the poetry of this 'I', and the philosophy of the same 'I' that from Poggio and Felelfo to Byron and Goethe produced a number of works astonishing for their profundity and brilliance have finally exhausted its content; and in the poetry of Decadence we see the rapid falling away of the empty shell of this 'I'. We remarked previously about the exaggeration without the exaggerated object, and about the precious style without the subject of this preciosity, which characterize this poetry - this is so in regard to its form; in regard to its content Decadence is above all hopeless egoism. The world, as an object of love, of interest, even as the object of indignation or contempt, has disappeared from this "poetry"; the world has disappeared, not only as an object exciting some reaction in this vapid 'I', but also as a spectator and possible judge of this 'I'; it is not even present.

("On Symbolists And Decadence") — Vasily Rozanov

The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with. — Charlie Munger

I'm like one of those Japanese bowls
That were made long ago
I have some cracks in me
They have been filled with gold

That's what they used back then
When they had a bowl to mend
It did not hide the cracks
It made them shine instead

So now every old scar shows
From every time I broke
And anyone's eyes can see
I'm not what I used to be

But in a collector's mind
All of these jagged lines
Make me more beautiful
And worth a much higher price

I'm like one of those Japanese bowls
I was made long ago
I have some cracks you can see
See how they shine of gold. — Peter Mayer

In nearly all cases where greatness is achieved, it's the goal that drives motivation and discipline - not the other way around. — Mark Murphy

All over the world, people are looking at India and saying 'wow', and that's because we have begun to say 'wow' ourselves. — Vidya Balan

I am shamed to realize that in my marriage, my daughters never heard their father and me fight, which also meant, perhaps, that we didn't truly communicate. — Sandra Tsing Loh

There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one chair founded on Peter by the word of the Lord. It is not possible to set up another altar or for there to be another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever has gathered elsewhere is scattering. — Cyprian

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Obviously, for these artists history has died; and even in their favorite "subjects" the face, name, past, and future of man have died; and out of this dead silence, out of this dark non-existence protruded - just as for the Decadents of our own day - nothing but "pale legs," the fixed idea of their morbidly disposed imagination.

("On Symbolists And Decadents") — Vasily Rozanov

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked. — Mary Karr

When angry, a man has deserted his body. — Publilius Syrus

We didn't have the phrase 'style icon' when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets - I liked how they dressed - and Catholic school boys. — Patti Smith