"Symbolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then expounded to him with as much vivacity as possible, the Metamorphosis of Plants,[71] drawing out on paper, with many characteristic strokes, a symbolic Plant for him, as I proceeded. He heard and saw all this with much interest and distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he shook his head and said: "This is no experiment, this is an idea." I stopped with some degree of irritation; ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the people, as Paul and the Apostles did throughout the heathen world, in order to convert them to Christianity, and change the whole character of their lives and habits. The presbyter, while he baptized believers and administered the symbolic bread and wine, also taught the people, explained to them the mysteries, enforced upon them the obligations, appealed to their intellects, their consciences, and their hearts. He plunged fearlessly into every subject bearing upon religious ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the so-called forbidden fruit or apple seems to have borne somewhat the same symbolic meaning that the egg did. But while the apple not only represented Life, but also, and primarily, that union between two sexes or principles which produces life, the egg more or less lacked the latter meaning, and, on the other hand, signified ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... and servants, who dwell under its shelter, and extending a large hospitality to the friend and the stranger. One generation after another grows up in it under all good and gracious influences; a special providence, under the symbolic forms of Cypris Urania or Artemis the Giver of Light, holds the house in keeping, and each new year brings increased blessing from the gods of the household in recompense of piety and duty.[2] Many ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... seen in many Welsh homes, where they hung as things of ornament and sentiment, for it is said they were given in "spooning" days to the girl of his choice by the lover. The handle is of course the appropriate field of decoration, the double bowl being symbolic of "We two are one." The dated spoons were mostly made in the ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... scarlet, and gold, tumble in masses from lofty branches, and the dazzling Bougainvillea flings curtains of roseate purple over wall and gateway. A dense thicket of frangipanni scents the air with the symbolic blossoms, shining like stars from grey-green boughs of sharp-cut leaves. A copse of splendid tree-ferns flanks the forest-like plantation known as "The Thousand Palms," and beneath dusky avenues of waringen (a variety of the banyan species, which ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the deep silence, something deliciously heavenly about it. Mysterious echoes repeat from the far end of the temple each of his words, and in the dim light of the sanctuary the golden candlesticks glitter like precious stones. The old stained-glass windows with their symbolic figures become suddenly illuminated, a flood of light and sunshine spreads through the church like a sheet of fire. Are the heavens opening? Is the Spirit from on high ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... blue fields. The sky was lucent as a crystal, and the purple would not die out of the west until nearly midnight. Evelyn would have liked to have stayed with him in the twilight, for as the landscape darkened, his strange figure grew symbolic, and his words, whether by beauty of verbal expression or the manner with which they were spoken, seemed to bring the unseen world nearer. The outside world seemed to slip back, to become subordinate as earth becomes subordinate to the sky when the stars come. Evelyn felt the life of the flesh ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of state: President Kay Rala Xanana GUSMAO (since 20 May 2002); note - the president plays a largely symbolic role but is able to veto legislation, dissolve parliament, and call national elections; he formerly used the name Jose Alexandre GUSMAO head of government: Prime Minister Jose RAMOS-HORTA (since ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... looking eastward. The first sunlight had begun to warm and colour the pale light of the dawn. Mauve pyjamas and white pyjamas; they were a young and charming couple. The rising sun touched their faces. It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... degree—coming down one of the narrow streets. The principal priest carried in his arms a wooden idol, ferocious in aspect, yet beautiful with its decorations of shell, turquoise, and brilliant paint. It was nearly hidden by symbolic slats and prayer-sticks most elaborately plumed. He was preceded by a guardian with drawn bow and arrows, while another followed, twirling the sounding slat, which had attracted alike my attention and that of hundreds ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... devotion of a primitive race. These images that you view across the carved and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... function, and process of mythical and symbolic facts led in course of time to the evolution and beginning of knowledge, which is first empirical and then rational. Therefore, we must repeat, the extrinsic and intrinsic perception, the specification of types, and their modification into a unity which ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... mahogany table, captured at the siege of Delhi and used in camp on the Ridge; the other two leaves were taken by the 60th Rifles and the 2nd Gurkhas, who lay alongside the Guides at Hindu Rao's house. On the leaves are roughly carved symbolic crests and mottoes for the three regiments: A Maltese Cross and Celer et Audax for the 60th Rifles; crossed swords and Stout and Steady for the Gurkhas; and crossed Afghan knives with Rough and Ready ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... was carried in a litter. A carriage was often taken to pieces at Conway, and carried to the Menai Straits on the peasants' shoulders round the dangerous cliff of Penmaenmawr. Mr. B. and Mr. D. remain mysterious symbolic initials of gossip and scandalmongering. St. Gregory's near St. Paul's, was a church entirely destroyed by ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... although the portrait of Richard himself was a likeness, the setting was imaginary and symbolic. The artist wished to tell in his picture how all the Kings who succeed one another upon the throne of England alike depend upon the protection of Heaven, and how Richard in his turn acknowledged that dependence, and pledged his loyalty to the Blessed Virgin and her Holy Child. That picture ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... end of the Hall of Maati accompanied by the two goddesses of Law and Truth, and the Forty-Two gods who are there to assist him. Each of the Forty-Two gods represents one of the nomes of Egypt and has a symbolic name. When the deceased had repeated the magical names of the doors of the Hall, he entered it and saw these gods arranged in two rows, twenty-one on each side of the Hall. At the end, near Osiris, were ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... they looked into the water, standing face to face when they questioned their hearts, then scrambled up the rock and seated themselves to come to an understanding. Their figures stood out very sharply, looking as if they were alone in the middle of the wide horizon, and assuming a sort of symbolic dignity in that vast expanse of sky and sea ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... clothes and ornaments, it is then placed on a scaffold or in a tree until the flesh is entirely decayed, after which the bones are buried and grave-posts fixed. At the head of the grave a tubular piece of cedar or other wood, called the adjedatig, is set. This grave-board contains the symbolic or representative figure, which records, if it be a warrior, his totem, that is to say the symbol of his family, or surname, and such arithmetical or other devices as seem to denote how many times the deceased ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... thus called into being; between that which makes in its own image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... center of a formal parapet at the end of the basin of water, sixty feet from the fountain, is a colossal figure symbolic of the setting sun, Helios, the great orb having thrown off the nebulous mass that subsequently ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... the symbolic animal, usually assigned to him, occupy nearly the whole of their respective pages. They are taken from Byzantine models, of which, as Westwood points out, nothing remains but the attitudes, the fashion of the dress and the form of the seats. There can be little doubt that these illuminations ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... spread through all the land of Judea and the country around the Jordan. Many were baptised by him there, he making use of this symbolic service which had been long in use by certain branches of the Jewish people, especially the order ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... two lights appeared at the further end. They came towards her swiftly, almost silently. It was like the swoop of an immense bird. And then in the strong glare shed forth by the hall-lamps she saw the huge body of an ambulance-car, and a Red Cross flared symbolic in the light. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the Formularies, Confessions of Faith, or Symbolic Books, of the Roman-Catholic, ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... may further observe, that the scientific train of reasoning is of the kind which embodies what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls "symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order."[26] That is to say, we can see how such simple laws as that action and reaction are equal and opposite may have been self-evolved, and from this fact we go on generalising and generalising, until ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... mind of the sufferer—will seldom fail to discover the influence of sexual forces and sexual attractions which, while capable of causing disorders of mind and of conduct, show themselves only obscurely and indirectly, as, for example, in dreams or in symbolic form. ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... deck-passengers, who seemed to recognize the proper shrines by a sort of devotional instinct, and were soon wholly absorbed in their prayers and prostrations. It is very evident to me that the Russian race requires the formulas of the Eastern Church; a fondness for symbolic ceremonies and observances is far more natural to its character than to the nations of Latin or Saxon blood. In Southern Europe the peasant will exchange merry salutations while dipping his fingers in the holy water, or turn in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... however, nothing is dramatic except that which strikes the eye as symbolic—an important action which betokens one still more important. That Shakespeare could attain this height too is evidenced in the scene where the son and heir takes the crown from the side of the father slumbering on his deathbed, places it on his own head, and struts ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that system of symbolic [6] usages, and they in turn developed in him further, a great seriousness—an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour on which they live, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... intensified to heroic proportions. That is the inevitable theatrical treatment of the murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was purely theatrical, and not, as in his later dramas, also philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried's Death was equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the dramas of which Siegfried's antagonist Wotan is the hero, likewise philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists therefore produce ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... reference in the study of ancient American pottery, I consider the collection invaluable, as it can scarcely be possible that the forms and decorations contain nothing that has been handed down from a former age. Although the figures used have no symbolic characters connected with them in the mind of the modern artist, yet it is more than probable that at least some of them did have such a meaning to the ancient artists. For example, the little tadpole-shaped ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... the Prophets, that nothing but the carnal literality common to the Jews at that time and most strongly marked in the disciples, who were among the least educated of their countrymen, could have prevented the symbolic import and character of the words from being seen. The whole Gospel and the Epistles of John, are a virtual confutation of this reigning error—and no less is the Apocalypse whether written by, or under ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fantastic, pleasing, went the rout, and now the hugest crowd was here and now it was there, and now there were moments of even diffusion. At night the lights were in multitude, and in multitude the flaring and strange decorations. Day and night swung processions, stood spectacles, huge symbolic movements and attitudes, grown obscure and molded to the letter, now mere stage effects. Day by day through carnival week the noise increased, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... part they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact. In large part they are an expression of the relation of status,—a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other. Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character to ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... ease of the question overwhelmed Mrs. Berry and upset that train of symbolic representations by which she was seeking to make him guess the catastrophe and spare her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that certain natural objects were preferable to others. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collecting impressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance of nature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolic thing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or best-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also in each department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorial incense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... personal existence ascribed to such an abstraction, as well as the human shape, are merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter you read no incarnation ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... dream, at once simple and symbolic, which begins to worry Khalid. "For in the evening of the day he related it to me," writes Shakib, "I found him sitting on the edge of his bunk brooding over I know not what. It was the first time he had the blues. Nay, it was the first time he looked pensive and profound. And upon asking ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... palaces, temples, and towns, on the statuettes of bronze and terra-cotta which were buried under the thresholds of buildings and placed as votive offerings in the temples, upon cylinders and engraved stones, we find only complex and varied emblems, fantastic and symbolic forms, attitudes suggestive of worship and sacrifice (Figs. 20 and 21), images of gods, goddesses, and secondary genii, princes surrounded with royal pomp and offering their homage to the deity. Hence a certain ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... town, but we only half know them. The first settlers came from Devon. Well, where did they enter the town? From which point? Sudleigh side, or along by the river? I incline to the river. The doctor says it would be a fine symbolic thing to take the procession up to the church by the very way the first settlers came in. But where was it? I don't know, and nobody does, unless ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... of Lords," and other things of a celebrated nature, famous at home and abroad: but his peculiar feat, which had commended him at Reinsberg, was an Edition of HORACE: exquisite old FLACCUS brought to perfection, as it were; all done with vignettes, classical borderings, symbolic marginal ornaments, in fine taste and accuracy, the Text itself engraved; all by the exquisite burin of Pine. ["London, 1737" (Biographie Universelle, xxxiv. 465).] This Edition had come out last year, famous over the world; and was by and by, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... I've seen her in her salad days. 'Twas potato salad, too, symbolic of the soil whence ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... was probably representative of a god or spirit of earth, growth, or vegetation, represented also by a tree. A symbolic branch of such a tree was borne by kings, and perhaps by Druids, who used oak branches in their rites.[528] King and tree would be connected, the king's life being bound up with that of the tree, and perhaps at one time both ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... of the adventures of Ulysses. The quoted passage is in the Odyssey, Bk. XXII, 10. When Ulysses reached home he wreaked vengeance on the suitors of his wife. Antinous was the first to fall. The story of the "bitter shaft" blotted out by a flower is symbolic of the story of the hatred of Lutwyche, which was robbed of its bitterness by ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... is under the poet's wand above all, that, like the marble at Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and the creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... usual course in Scotland, and any member of the Privy Council might, at any time, find it desirable to call a similar convocation of his allies. Mary herself, fretted by the perfidies of Elizabeth, had just been consoled by that symbolic jewel, a diamond shaped like a rock, and by promises in which she fondly trusted when she at last sought an asylum in England, and found a prison. For two months she had often been in deep melancholy, weeping for no known cause, and she was afflicted by the "pain in her side" which ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... motive, and I didn't mean any one to know about it; but it got round, and I suddenly found that it had caught the imaginations of some of the fellows, and I realized that if one was to have any power over them one must do symbolic things to show them that one meant what one said about love being really better than money, and all that sort of thing. So in rather a half-hearted way I did try to do things which would show them that I was in earnest. I took a couple of rooms in a little cottage ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking at as it passed through the curve of life,—the vital parabola, which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a continuous ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... (of IHVH), is not called the Bride; but the last H, He, is called the Bride at certain times on account of many symbolic reasons. ...
— Hebrew Literature
... underground—it is located upstairs; but in all other regards it is supposed to conform exactly to one of the real ceremonial chambers of the Hopis. The dried-mud walls are covered thickly with symbolic devices, painted on; and there is an altar tricked out with totems of the Powamu clan, one of the biggest ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... high minister Of spirit's joys, was his, reserved, restrained. His song was like the sword Excalibur Of his symbolic knight; trenchant, unstained. It shook the world of wordly baseness, smote The Christless heathendom of huckstering days. There is no harshness in that mellow note, No blot upon those bays; For loyal love and knightly valour ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... every four years, all the higher activities of Athenian life were ideally displayed—contests of song, of lyre and of flute, foot and horse races, wrestling, boxing, and the like, military evolutions of infantry and horse, pyrrhic dances symbolic of attack and defence in war, mystic chants of women and choruses of youths—the whole concentring and discharging itself in that great processional act in which, as it were, the material forms of society became transparent, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... which forms part of the Senchus Mor, and is supposed to be a portion of the Brehon code, and traceable to the time of St. Patrick, speaks of land in a poetically symbolic, but actually realistic manner, and says, "Land is perpetual man." All the ingredients of our physical frame come from the soil. The food we require and enjoy, the clothing which enwraps us, the fire which warms ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... deprivation, plunges one type of person into deepest sorrow, a helpless sorrow, inert and symbolic of the hopeless frustration of love. The same affliction striking at another man's heart makes him deeply and soberly reflective, and out of it there ensues a great philanthropy, a great memorial to his grief. For the ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... writing; first, the hieroglyphic; secondly, the hieratic, which is nearly the same, but written with a pen, and less ornamental than the carved figures; and thirdly, the demotic, or common alphabetic writing. He then divides the hieroglyphic into the alphabetic and the symbolic; and lastly, he divides the symbolic characters into the imitative, the figurative, and those formed like riddles. As instances of these last we may quote, for the first, the three zigzag lines which by simple imitation mean "water;" for the second, the oval ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... been before. Instead of caring that his pupil should understand this or that particular, he would be speculating on Euphra's behaviour, trying to account for this or that individual look or tone, or seeking, perhaps, a special symbolic meaning in some general remark that she had happened to let fall. Meanwhile, poor Harry would be stupifying himself with work which he could not understand for lack of some explanation or other that ought to have been given him weeks ago. Still, however, he clung ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... officials of the Church were bestowed extensive estates which should make them a counterpoise to the secular nobles. In theory the clergy and people of the diocese still elected their bishop, but in reality he came to be nominated by the King, at whose hands he received investiture of his office by the symbolic gifts of the ring and the pastoral staff, and to whom he did homage for the lands of the see, since by virtue of them he was a baron of the realm. Thus for all practical purposes the great ecclesiastic was a secular noble, a layman. He had often obtained his high ecclesiastical office as a reward ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... evil), he transfigured as it were in one instant its whole meaning by exclaiming, "Thus, and by this contact with the earth, do I take possession of thee, O Africa!" in that way giving to an accident the semblance of a symbolic purpose. Equally conspicuous was the grandeur of fortitude with which he faced the whole extent of a calamity when palliation could do no good, "non negando, minuendove, sed insuper amplificando, ementiendoque"; as when, upon finding his soldiery alarmed at ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... Templars recognize at the same time a good god, incommunicable to man and consequently without symbolic representation, and a bad god, to whom they give the features of an ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... shrines, etc., etc. Some kinds are worn about the person;—others are made into pellets, and swallowed as spiritual medicine. The text of the larger o- fuda is often accompanied by curious pictures or symbolic illustrations. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, could one but ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... these Byzantine pictures that while the figure-painting is often really excellent, the design skilful, and the pose natural, the landscape, trees, etc., are quite symbolic and fanciful. The painters seem to have been utterly ignorant of perspective. Buildings, too, without any regard to relative proportion, are coloured merely as parts of a colour scheme. They are pink, pale green, yellow, violet, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... was instructing Gladys in the mysteries of symbolic decoration, Sahwah and Hinpoha, finishing their tennis game, strolled into the woods beyond the court, looking for berries. "Let's make a leaf cup and fill it ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... desk, in the inner of three successively smaller offices on the second floor of the converted warehouse, checking over a symbolic-logic analysis of a relay system and, at the same time, sharpening a pencil, his knife paring off tiny feathery shavings of wood. He was a tall, sparely-built, man of indeterminate age, with thinning ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... Lit. 'long stone,' a megalithic monument. See Chapter II, "Menhirs and Dolmens." Students of folk-lore will recognize the symbolic significance of the offering. We seem to have here some connexion with pillar-worship, as found in ancient Crete, and the adoration of the Irminsul among ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... The afternoon had faded but the lamps had been brought in, the smell of flowers was in the air and the old house of Plash seemed to recognise the hour that suited it best. The quiet old lady in the firelight, encompassed with the symbolic security of chintz and water-colour, gave her a sudden vision of how blessed it would be to jump all the middle dangers of life and have arrived at the end, safely, sensibly, with a cap and gloves and consideration and memories. 'And, Lady ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... initiated and another for the simple. His political work on 'Reforme intellectuelle et morale' contains the strongest argument of the last hundred years against the very principle of democracy, natural equality. His two symbolic dramas—'Caliban' and 'Eau de Jouvence'—may be summed up in this reflection of the prior of Chartreux, seated in his stall while the organ plays alone, and the crowd presses around the crowned Caliban: ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... himself gave both the parable and its explanation; he became his own interpreter. The Master takes us, like little children, by the hand and leads us through all the turnings of his first symbolic lesson, lest in our inexperience we should miss our way. The Son of God not only gave himself as a sacrifice for sin; he also laboured as a patient painstaking teacher of the ignorant: he is the Apostle as well as the High Priest of our profession. His instructions have been recorded by the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the disturbing thought. She heard him pronounce several names: Belarab, Daman, Tengga, Ningrat. These belonged now to her life and she was appalled to find she was unable to connect these names with any human appearance. They stood out alone, as if written on the night; they took on a symbolic shape; they imposed themselves upon her senses. She whispered as if pondering: "Belarab, Daman, Ningrat," and these barbarous sounds seemed to possess an exceptional energy, a fatal aspect, the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of flame, loveliest of inanimate things—even there no sustained, no deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious aspirations, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... a little lower. The car had now stopped, and the conductor came forward, brandishing what was apparently the wand of authority, designed to be symbolic rather than utile, since at no point was it thicker than a man's finger. From a safe distance on the running-board, he flourished this, whooping the while in a shrill and dissuasive manner. Somewhere down the street was heard a responsive yell, and a small, jerky, olive-green ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our every-day ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Christian religion instituted only two symbolic ordinances—Baptism and the Lord's Supper. [218:4] It is universally admitted that, in the apostolic age, baptism was dispensed to all who embraced the gospel; but it has been much disputed whether it was also administered to the infant children of the converts. The testimony ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... usually a sign of grief, a symbolic act which dates from the days of the Heb. patriarchs (Gen. xxxvii. 29-34); but here it is the mark of strong excitement. The hand is placed within the collar and a strong pull tears the light stuff all down the breast. Economical men do this in a ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... limestone, which, however, is rapidly losing its red color, owing to the disappearance of the red strata from above. Cheops is five thousand three hundred and fifty feet in elevation, and is of a peculiar shape, as of some quaint and Oriental device of symbolic significance. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... perfectly straight flagpole graced the extensive "front-yard," and from its peak floated the flag of Trigger Island,—a great white pennon with a red heart in the centre, symbolic of love, courage, fidelity. But on the tip of Split Mountain the Stars and Stripes still waves ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... barrier between East and West. A new cotton country, the best in the world, was discovered in America. Cotton invaded England and after a hard fight, with fists as well as finance, wool was beaten in its chief stronghold. Cotton became King and the wool-sack in the House of Lords lost its symbolic significance. ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... National Museum at Washington, is akin to the Boston Library ceiling in its employment of horses symbolically, its light, luminous color, and its subtle play of illumination. This charm of illumination is unfortunately lost in reproduction. Mr. Elliott has made symbolic use of Diana, the Moon Goddess. in a way obvious enough, but hitherto, oddly, untried by artists. It is a way singularly appropriate in a museum of scientific character—a combination of ancient myth and modern science. As the Moon Goddess, Diana controls the four tides, which, in the shape of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the "L": that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the wood-shed and cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it enables ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip Sidney. In the course of the history of English letters certain authors disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position: they are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There are not many of them and they could be easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably Tennyson. But the greatest ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the tiled flooring. Her excessive suffering had taken all the blood from her heart, and, fainting away, she lay there, as if she were dead, like a white rag, miserable, done for, crushed beneath the fierce sovereignty of Art. Above her the nude woman rose radiant in her symbolic idol's brightness; painting triumphed, alone immortal and ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... something. It is all very well for cultivated persons with libraries to scoff at religious services. To the poor the cathedral or the church might be an immense benefit, if only for the reason that they present a barrier to worldly noise, and are a distinct invitation by architecture and symbolic decoration to meditation on something beyond the business which presses on them during the week. Poor people frequently cannot read for want of a place in which to read. Moreover, they require to be provoked ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... apologised for my stupidity in taking the wrong turning, and I asked him about Mr. Gladstone's three mysterious hats in the hall, which he informed me Mr. Gladstone always had by him,—three hats symbolic of his oratorical peculiarity of using the well-known phrase, "There are ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... child baptized out of the ordinary way. There was a middle course, and this was to inscribe the child among the catechumens. According to the rite of the first admission to the lowest order of catechumens, the sign of the cross was made on Augustin's forehead, and the symbolic salt placed between his lips. And so they did not baptize him. Possibly this affected his whole life. He lacked the baptismal modesty. Even when he was become a bishop, he never quite cast off the old man ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... great work its due appreciation we must take it as a whole, as the profound genius of Fra Angelico had conceived it. Wishing to give it the unity of a dramatic poem, he placed at the beginning and at the end, like a prologue and an epilogue, two symbolic figures, in the last of which the seven branched candlestick serves as a support to the Old ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... and psychology in the least, we may take this symbolic syllogism as a sort of map, on which to trace out the different exploratory processes that we have already described under the head of "varieties of reasoning". To do so may make these different ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... by a chapter on "Grimm's Law," which would give work enough for a lifetime. We next plunge into botany, and have a whole chapter on the "words for fir, oak, and beech," which shows that the author, like our own Mr. Marsh, has studied the literal roots as well as the symbolic. Later, we come to astronomy, whence one of our author's favorite theories conducts us into the Greek mythology, to which two whole lectures are given. Then comes another chapter, tracing the "myths of the dawn" still farther back toward the dim origin of the Aryan race; and the book closes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... peaceful, happy day of rejoicing, thanksgiving and praise to the Giver of all good. Easter is symbolic of a new life, and a brighter one. It is springtime, the sun shines brightly, and Nature smiles. She is rejoicing because her dead are coming to life again. The trees, the grass, the flowers all rise ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... red scarf. Near the principal goddess was a piece of the wood from the first timber of the junk that was laid; this was taken to one of their principal temples, there consecrated, and then brought on board, and placed as symbolic of the whole vessel's being under the protection of the deity. A small earthen pot, containing sacred earth and rice, stood in front, in which Joss-sticks and other incense was burnt. A lighted lamp, too, was ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... of other objects of adoration are mentioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women, and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children, smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globe this is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers all partake in the same life.) Some tribes were fiercer than others, and practised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Shakespeare's plays were not put on more effectively then than in most of our modern theaters. The difference is one of principle, and even this difference may easily be exaggerated. When we say that Elizabethan stagings were 'symbolic,' whereas ours are pictorial, we mean that on the former the presence of a few selected objects suggested to the mind of the spectator all the others which go to make up the kind of scene presented. When a few trees were placed ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... his keen sword Endicott assaulted the hallowed Maypole. Nor long did it resist his arm. It groaned with a dismal sound, it showered leaves and rosebuds upon the remorseless enthusiast, and finally, with all its green boughs and ribbons and flowers, symbolic of departed pleasures, down fell the banner-staff of Merry Mount. As it sank, tradition says, the evening sky grew darker and the woods threw forth a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... course ascribed to it in the same connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling, partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful readers ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... nothing here," and Mrs. Fairford supplemented the description by defining his painting as "chafing-dish" art. On a certain late afternoon of December, some four years after Mr. Popple's first meeting with Miss Undine Spragg of Apex, even the symbolic chafing-dish was nowhere visible in his studio; the only evidence of its recent activity being the full-length portrait of Mrs. Ralph Marvell, who, from her lofty easel and her heavily garlanded frame, faced ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... most admirable central city that men have built, for no other represents the land around it so faithfully as Luchon does. Neither Mexico nor Merv, nor Timbuctoo nor Lassa, nor Winnipeg nor Naples, attain its symbolic exactness." ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... into a moral code, of which the dogma was now but a symbol, which, in the people's eyes, comprised sacred truths; and which, gradually stripped of holy fictions, would allow the human understanding to glide insensibly into a symbolic deism, whose temple should be flesh, and whose Christ should be hardly more than Plato rendered a divinity. Fauchet had the daring mind of a sectarian and the intrepidity of a ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the individual. Or it may be expressed only in language, in which case it may stop at the stage of erotic fantasy and day-dream, or may result in some really great piece of poetry or prose. This last outlet is so common that our language is full of symbolic words and phrases which have a hidden erotic ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... crown of the foundation colour. On this crown in one corner are the letters "H.I." (in Latin characters "N.I." or Nicolas 1st) and five semicircles in gold. The explanations as to the meanings are slightly different. Both say the black border is symbolic of mourning for the losses at Kossovo, while the five lines are explained either as signifying the five centuries which have elapsed since that terrible battle or as symbolic of a rainbow—the sign of hope that one day the glories of the old Serb empire will be restored. The red ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... corrected. A list of changes is found at the end of the book. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been maintained. A list of those words is found at the end of the book. Oe ligatures have been expanded. The original book used both numerical and symbolic footnote markers. This version follows the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... sparrow-hawk is chiefly used to denote the soul of a god; the human-headed sparrow-hawk, the heron, or the crane is used indifferently for human or divine souls. It is from Horapollo that we learn this symbolic significance of the sparrow-hawk and the pronunciation of the name of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... wall has the "Fortitude," the "Calumny," and the two little "Judith and Holofernes" pictures. Upon the "Fortitude," to which I have already alluded, it is well to look at Ruskin, who, however, was not aware that the artist intended any symbolic reference to the character and career of Piero de' Medici. The criticism is in "Mornings in Florence" and it is followed by some fine pages on the "Judith". The "Justice," "Prudence," and "Charity" of the Pollaiuolo brothers, belonging to ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... afterwards for Rankin in the lurid and symbolic colours of his Celtic fancy. "Talk of Samson among the Philistines, it's nothing to Ricky-ticky in that d——d boarding-house. There was a woman on each side of his bed. They'd got him down on it; they were pinning the poor ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... displayed, and if no better, certainly no worse, than it has been shown by others- -a place, at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light—a place that haunts solemnly the hearts of children. And then this symbolic draughtsman once more strikes into his proper vein. Three cuts conclude the first part. In the first the gates close, black against the glory struggling from within. The second shows us Ignorance—alas! poor Arminian!—hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... north-winds, and their flowing manes Were flecked with diamonds brighter than Brazilian stones! He came! To celebrate his triumph, first He spread a fleecy mantle o'er the earth— A frozen shroud symbolic of the Death he wrought. And then to every pendent branch he hung A glittering sword,—the tyrant's right to rule,— Demanding greater homage ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... learning is Saraswati. My audience in the West, I am sure, will be glad to know that her complexion is white. But the signal fact is that she is living and she is a woman, and her seat is on a lotus-flower. The symbolic meaning of this is, that she dwells in the centre of life and the heart of all existence, which opens itself in beauty to the ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... going to be Patriarchal," said Vernon. "What a symbolic dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There's the tragedy of romance, in a nut-shell. Yes, life's a beastly rotten show, and the light won't last more than ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the eye of the artist was gladdened by their decay. The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland nature, slow to bloom and slow to die—had hardly a faded leaf to murk the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... established a direct connection between dreams and insanity, between the symbolic visions of our sleep and the symbolic actions of the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... says, "those of Ibsen's dramas which are sane and clear, but those generally termed symbolic have been unintelligible to me, and I have never found the pleasure in them which those may who can disentangle their intricate meaning." What a curious statement, in the light of the other preface, written eight years ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... my father, in that tone of voice which always puzzled even my mother to be sure whether he was in jest or earnest, "in all these fables certain philosophers could easily discover symbolic significations of the highest morality. I have myself written a treatise to prove that Puss in Boots is an allegory upon the progress of the human understanding, having its origin in the mystical schools of the Egyptian priests, and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great use for the word "threshold" as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... tranquil summer air. The breeze was south-by-southwest; the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology. Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside them ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Columbia, the impersonation of the New World. An Indian at the chariot wheels stoops to gather the gifts of civilization as they fall from the cornucopia borne by the goddess. And thus is told in enduring bronze, by the genius of the artist, the symbolic story of the introduction of civilization to ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... ringing for the last few years with the word 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,' 'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic' treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares very little about ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... time, but yet substantially. For thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and heaven-storming giants before the mild reign ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... sparkling oratory. In his concluding passage he said: "Nor in all these have I for an instant forgotten the dual nature of that ministry, which has been so richly blessed. I recall that in the prophet's symbolic act, he took to himself two staves, the one was 'Beauty,' while the other was 'Bands.' In the kingdom of grace and in the kingdom of nature, loveliness is ever the fit complement of strength. Accordingly, to her, who has been the enthroned one in the heart, the light-giver in the ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... Adam felt so miserable, so jealous, so heartsick. His eyes were filled with the great figure. Henry was, in truth, magnificent, not only in himself, but in what he represented. He seemed symbolic of a great era of the past, and at the same time of a new age which was advancing. Old Adam understood ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... river has refreshed the body, the Kayan, Dayak, Kenyah, Sibop, or whatever the tribe, will put on the same dirty waist-cloth or cotton jacket that has never known soap, and has seldom if ever been nearer the water than when on the back of its owner. Perhaps it is that water is symbolic of life and motion; the river is always moving, it murmurs and talks to itself, a draft of its coolness and a plunge into its embrace adds new life to man; why should it not be the giver of life? ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... all connections with his former life remains and it is perhaps symbolic of his purpose that he now recalls the hunch-back girl, Kubja, takes Udho with him and in a single ecstatic visit becomes her lover. As he reaches her house, the girl greets him with delight, takes ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the present life-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind of symbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had become one of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier German life—with its measure, its kindness, its idealism—on which Germany has turned ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... complete—symbolic, Ian thought, of the condition of his own heart. Besides having eight or ten feet of water on its walls, all the lower rooms were utterly wrecked. A heavy log, ready for the saw-pit, had come down with the torrent, ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... tall iron fence with the bristling spikes to keep out the mob, and that queer underground entrance on the side. These feudal minarets, battlements and frowning black iron pikes, were they symbolic of a revival of the feudal spirit of the Middle Ages? Or were they merely the day-dreams of an artist with no social meaning beyond the vagaries of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... are seven yellow, five-pointed stars with three centered in the top red border, three centered in the bottom red border, and one on a red disk superimposed at the center of the flag; there is also a symbolic nutmeg pod on the hoist-side triangle (Grenada is the world's second-largest producer of nutmeg, after Indonesia); the seven stars represent ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... inseparable from that gateway of the East. The streets below, white under the moon, looked empty and deserted, and the hotel beneath him gave up no sound to tell of the many birds of passage who sheltered within it. A stunning sense of his loneliness came to him; his physical loneliness was symbolic of that which characterised his place in the world. He, alone, had the knowledge and the power to crush Antony Ferrara. He, alone, could rid the world of the unnatural menace embodied in the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... said, "leave these abstruse studies; take off that symbolic coat, that tinsel crown; wash, comb your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... my explanation of the symbolic meaning which fur has acquired as the attribute of power and beauty. Monarchs and the dominant higher nobility in former times used it in this sense for their costume, exclusively; great painters used it only for queenly beauty. The most beautiful frame, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... transfigure the familiar things of life in glorious haste and inspiration? While following his rules and habits my father was constantly attended by the rapturous spirit of such a genius, transmuting swarming reality into a few symbolic types. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... have taken firm root in his hitherto unstable mind. He laid siege to Noteburg, where he found a garrison of only four hundred fifty men, and on December 11, 1702, he rechristened the little fortress he had captured, by a new and symbolic name, "Schluesselburg" (Key ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Bishop of Chester, [10] and published early in the reign of Charles II., a folio which I, in youthful days, not only read but studied, this language is recorded and accurately described amongst many other modes of cryptical communication, oral and visual, spoken, written, or symbolic. And, as the bishop does not speak of it as at all a recent invention, it may probably at that time have been regarded as an antique device for conducting a conversation in secrecy amongst bystanders; and this advantage it has, that it is applicable ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the middle star and Akbar to the left of the middle star - was added in January 1991 during the Persian Gulf crisis; similar to the flag of Syria which has two stars but no script and the flag of Yemen which has a plain white band; also similar to the flag of Egypt which has a symbolic eagle centered in the ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government |
