"Symbolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what it was. Well, my dear Father bought me a new-born lamb, all white and fleecy. He said that before I entered the Carmel he wanted me to have this pleasure. We were all delighted, especially Celine. What touched me more than anything was Papa's thoughtfulness. Besides, a lamb is symbolic, and it made me think ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... attention to his consolation. Her face was gray as granite. Her hands kept folding and unfolding. There was something symbolic in their emptiness. "You won't come back. It's the end. You weren't sent, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... remnants of a giant wheel which formerly had been turned by water, brought from the hills to feed the Fathers' lands. The water was still flowing, but the wheel lay, broken,—symbolic of the link which bound the ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... 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 of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image of the divine. At the very ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack happy?" We read in a passage, which it is true, is largely symbolic, that one of Jesus' quotations from the Old Testament was that "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Luke 4:4). Hunger is a real thing—horribly real; but it is comparatively easy to deal with, and man has deeper needs. The Shoeblack, according to Teufelsdroeckh, wants "God's ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... "It's symbolic, isn't it?" said Gregory. "It will stay here, I suppose, as long as Madame von Marwitz and Karen go on caring for each other. With all my griefs and suspicions I hope that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... would know that she had been too late. For the rest of her life she would only review them: the Bar, the wet roads, the detour, and the frightful seconds on the bridge. There had been something expiatory, something symbolic in this mad adventure, this flight through the night. The fires that had been burning in her heart for the past terrible hours were purged, she must be changed forevermore after to-night. But for the new birth, Derry must not be the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... times. Savants will not be slow to see in this a vague relic of the horrible festivities that succeeded human sacrifices among primitive peoples. For want of prisoners and of designated victims, a symbolic representation would have gradually developed, and been kept up, though losing its religious character. We merely call brief attention to this obscure problem, not having the pretension to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... the ruins of the three towns, which successively rose from the site of Troy, are found similar strange-looking idols, hatchets in jade, porphyry, diorite, and bronze, goblets with two handles, clumsy stone hammers, trachyte grindstones, and fusaioles or perforated whorls bearing symbolic signs of a similar form. Evidently the men who succeeded each other after the great siege of Troy on the now celebrated hill of Hissarlik belonged to the same race, perhaps even to the same tribe. There are, however, ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... symbolic expression of his right of property in their souls and bodies, perhaps the preacher rose a little above the heads of his audience. Most of his flock were busied with a kind of speculation so foreign to that of metaphysics that they would have been puzzled to explain what was meant by Descartes' ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... angels meet them; Heaven is 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... December 12, 1912.] It is owing to the existence of the last two groups that our fashionable intelligence is now often so suggestive of a wine-list. Among animal names adopted the favourites were Adler, eagle, Hirsch, hart, Loewe, lion, and Wolf, each of which is used with symbolic significance in the ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... been accorded the proposal made in the French Chamber that the ashes of an unnamed French soldier, fallen for his country, shall be removed with solemn ceremony to the Pantheon. In this way it is intended to honor by a symbolic ceremony the memory of all who lie in ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope. For to many is marriage promised, and more ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of him. Both purely regional coronets belonged over in the farthest dusty corner behind the curtain, along with Schicklehitler's shabby baton and that crummy Peacock Throne. What he really needed was a crown worthily symbolic of the position he'd make it possible to publicly ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... many conclusions and recommendations as there were speakers. And through it all Hilton and Sandra listened. They weighed and tested and analyzed and made copious notes; in shorthand and in the more esoteric characters of symbolic logic. And at ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... called Festival Hall, and jinin' these three buildin's together are what they call the Collonnade of States. A impressive row of snow-white pillows, and on them pillows, settin' up in the place of honor, are big statutes of female wimmen, fourteen in number, symbolic of the original States of ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... fact that they take up a great many pages? It is simply a question of their style—the style of their conception and the style of their writing; the whole style of their imagination, in fact. They take us into a region in which nothing happens that is not deeply significant; a dominant, noticeably symbolic, purpose presides over each poem, moulds it greatly and informs ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... anything should happen," while the crystal glasses were kept on the second from the top, instead of the top shelf, in the china closet. Rebecca had had to stand on a chair to reach them; now she could do it by stretching; and this is symbolic of the way in which she unconsciously scaled the walls of ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... can say, his art has given meaning to the idea of human love, which in this period is looked upon with suspicious eyes as a bad coin, a new impetus, the reality and symbolic depth of which grips the heart. Out of his books one can draw life more than literature. A strong soul-similarity with Tolstoi might be observed, I think, if Hauptmann were a ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... seated at one 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, ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... There is, however, a deeper reason for his distrust of Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him dread, as death, every form of fallacy; but chiefly, fallacy respecting the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day discover more clearly how right Plato was in this, and feel ourselves more and more wonderstruck that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior sphere, Milton), not to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... asleep.[37] Then we would have on one side a motive for sleep walking in general, that one is playing the part of the loving parent, as on the other hand a motive for the lighted candle. The latter has however a symbolic sexual sense which is quite typical and is repeatedly and regularly found. The burning candle always stands for one thing and signifies in dreams as in fairy tales, folklore, and sagas without exception the same thing, an erect phallus. Now it becomes clear why Lady Macbeth, after her husband ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... were refreshed by the gossipy peasants, who repeated the tales that had come down as ancestral memories. In wandering around the site of his proposed labors Sir Arthur noticed some ruined walls, the great gypsum blocks of which were engraved with curious symbolic characters, crowning the southern slope of a hill known as Kephala, overlooking the ancient site of Knossos, the city of Minos. It was the prelude to the discovery of the ruins of a palace, the most wonderful ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "My little Asticot," he whispered to me, "have I really come to this, to sit at the feet of an acting pro-sub-vice-deputy infant Gamaliel and be taught the elements of symbolic poetry?" ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... half of the eighteenth century greater pains and finer workmanship appear to have been bestowed upon the symbolic figurement of the gravestone, and the more elaborate allegorical representations of which a few sketches have been given came into vogue and grew in popular favour until the century's end. Nor ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But, as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look steadily ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... associated with the relief from wet and irritating clothes, the pleasant bath, and the pleasure of the change of position that babies cry for. Her bosom and her arms become sources of pleasure, and the race has immortalized them as symbolic of motherhood, in song, in story ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... message 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 of ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... first of our company to pass over. Two days later the pupils of her class and ourselves gathered with the family for a simple service in the courtyard of her home. On the coffin the words were written at her own request, "Until He come"—symbolic of the hope which sustained her through those years of suffering, and kept her eyes ever upward turned to the promise of the great day of deliverance. A congregation of some hundreds assembled to see the unique sight of so many girls mourning ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... of English poetry, he pointed out a sonnet entitled Lost Days (to which, indeed, a friend at home had directed my attention), and dwelt upon its marvellous strength of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic phrase. Of course the sonnet was Rossetti's. It is impossible for me to describe the effect produced upon me by sonnet and exposition. I resolved not to live many days longer without acquiring a knowledge of the body of Rossetti's work. Perceiving ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... playing upon their harps, and these are described as the 'harps of God'. The harp here is used as a sign or symbol of some great truth, or feature of the divine program; in fact, a great deal of the Bible is written in symbolic phrase. The Lord uses objects which we know to illustrate great unseen things which we do not know; and the ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... carrying a distaff and a spindle, emblems of the industry that was thought necessary in the household work that she was to perform or direct. Strong men lifted her over the threshold, lest her foot should trip upon it, and her husband saluted her with fire and water, symbolic of welcome, after which he presented her the keys. A feast was then given to the entire train of friends and relatives, arid probably the song was sung of which Talasia was the refrain. [Footnote: ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... never really established that she was able to tell, by a kind of symbolic mind-picture method, like a short waking dream, approximately what TT was thinking and feeling. Five years before, when she'd discovered Tick-Tock—an odd-looking and odder-behaved stray kitten then—in the woods ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... as lightning plays on the surface of a cloud, marked the inward process whereby she was harmonizing in equilibrium opposing thoughts. And, as occasion offered, a felicitous quotation, pungent apothegm, or symbolic epithet, dropped unawares in undertone, showed how swiftly scattered rays were brought in her mind to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... half of the last century. The closing scenes suggest the great advance which has taken place during the century, and the part that work and play take to-day in re-establishing and maintaining life's balances. Finally, in symbolic processional, tribute is paid to Hygeia, the goddess of ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... Myra, and endeavoured to draw out her mind and feelings. He lent her books, and books that favoured, indirectly at least, his own peculiar views—volumes of divine poesy that had none of the twang of psalmody, tales of tender and sometimes wild and brilliant fancy, but ever full of symbolic truth. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the Sinaitic Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling of a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees," says Mr. Montefiore, and this ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... entitled Samuel to reward. That reward was one penny, so that in degree of merit, after all, the service may not have ranked high. But what perplexes us is the kind of merit. Did it bear some mystical or symbolic sense? Was it held to argue a spirit of general rebellion against Philosophy, that S. T. C. should so early in life, by one and the same act, proclaim mutinous disposition towards two of the most memorable amongst earth's philosophers—Moses and Pythagoras; of whom ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... "France is like." The whole civilian part of the nation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hope to the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded. The devotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive; but they are really based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinching estimate of ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... by Parisian man I mean, not the chorus men of Des Italiens, betalcumed and odoriferous with the scents of Pinaud, those weird birds who are guarded by the casual Yankee as typical and symbolic of the nation. Nor do I mean the fish-named, liver-faced denizens of the region down from the Opera, those spaniel-eyed creatures who live in the tracks of petite Sapphos, who spend the days in cigarette smoke, the nights in scheming ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... habits change is well known. Furthermore, purely physiological conditions operate in many directions, (such as blushing, trembling, laughter,[1] weeping, stuttering, etc.), and finally, very few men want to show their minds openly to their friends, so that they see no reason for co-ordinating their symbolic bodily expressions. Nevertheless, they do so, and not since yesterday, but for thousands of years. Hence definite expressions have been transmitted for generations and have at the same time been constantly modified, until to-day they are altogether unrecognizable. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor relied upon the school-children for chorus material, and upon the Madigans ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Power, and also Khepera, a kosmogonic deity of the highest type, had the scarab assigned to them as an emblem. It was one of the forms symbolic of the Demiurge or Maker of our universe. It was also the emblem of Ptah Tore, of Memphis, another symbolic form of the creative power. It was assigned as an emblem of Ptah-Sokari-Osiris, the pigmy deity of Memphis, being placed on his ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... hideous and grotesque in the appearance of the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position, and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially towards the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been flung up from the ground by the hand that had raised ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... of life as part of a journey to the heavenly city was, I think, one of these discoveries; and its rite was the church procession to the altar. In symbolic act man learned to make the journey beyond the blank horizon. He enlarged the church procession to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he enlarged the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the pilgrimage of life itself. In the understanding of life as a pilgrimage, the wanderer ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... bloated, Or ill some other ghastly fashion Within that bowel of compassion. True, I believe the only sinner Is he that eats a shabby dinner. You know how Adam with good reason, For eating apples out of season, Was "cursed." But that is all symbolic: The truth is, Adam had ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... caste or nationality cramped him, the first great Cosmopolite. We cannot sufficiently admire the infinite adaptability, the universal knowledge of humanity, the boundless sympathy with man, which are everywhere manifest in the original Christian philosophy of life. What a depth of meaning in the symbolic bread and wine, typical of the life which flows through eternity and all its changes, of human love and birth and death, of bounteous, beautiful nature, with its continually renewed strength—the whole ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... waking hours were spent. She had learned the beautiful art as a young girl in her convent school; and her skill in it was great. In those sad later years when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... sits his horse with the elegant tranquillity of one assured of celestial aid, down to him "who swings on a sign-post at mine hostess's door"—he is our familiar acquaintance. But who is that lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished dragon? "That is a copy after Raphael." And who is that majestic creature holding her palm-branch, while the unicorn crouches at her feet? "That is the famous Moretto at Vienna." Are we satisfied? Not in the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and Demosthenes, he had begun to write a Treatise upon the Will, a symbolic work which contained the germs of his entire destiny. His fellow students, rendered curious by his sustained application, continuing month after month, tried in vain to steal glimpses over his shoulder, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... Lectures on the Symbolic Character of the Sacred Scriptures. By Rev. Abiel Silver, Minister of the New Jerusalem Church in New York. New York. D. Appleton & ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... proofs to convince an unbeliever, he never brought them forward. His object in miracles, as stated by Mr. Furness, was simply to express his character. Some, indeed, were symbolical, as the cursing of the fig tree. It is the custom in the East for teachers to speak in symbolic language. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... and Eles, had little interviews with other red-faced, trip-hammer-fisted Jims, Toms, and Neds. These healths being duly drunk, the placards were posted. They were headed with the inspiring words "Liberty and Equality," with cuts of symbolic temples and ships and lifted arms with hammers, and summoned the legal voters to assemble in primary meetings and elect delegates to a convention to nominate a representative. The Hon. Mr. Bodley's letter ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... similar substance, which is moved by a key; incompatible combinations can thus be mechanically removed at will, in accordance with any given series of premises. The principal examples of such machines are those of W. S. Jevons (Element. Lessons in Logic, C. xxiii.), John Venn (see his Symbolic Logic, 2nd ed., 1894, p. 135), and Allan Marquand (see American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1885, pp. 303-7, and Johns Hopkins University ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Chute opened the Theater Royal, Bath, when, besides a specially written play symbolic of the event, his stock company performed "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Titania was the first Shakespeare part I had played since I left Charles Kean, but I think even in those early days I was more at home in Shakespeare than anything else. Mr. Godwin designed my dress, and we made ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... recalls to his mind that God is the central point of everything, from which everything is equally distant, and to which everything is equally near. By the square he is to learn that God made everything equal. The drift of these symbolic ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously, these have been thought points of honor with the gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most exhorbitant scale.... The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable philosophizing ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... purity, 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 rang Through rich ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... other king's deliverance. Hezekiah 'went unto the house of the Lord,' and found Him a very present help in trouble. Sennacherib was slain in the house of his god. The two pictures of the worshippers and their fates are symbolic of the meaning of the whole story. Sennacherib had dared Jehovah to try His strength against him and his deities. The challenge was accepted, and that bloody corpse before the idol that could not help preaches a ghastly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... However, whether reminiscent or symbolic, the design is, to my mind, an exceedingly unsatisfactory one, owing to its total want of principal subject. The fort ceases to be of importance because of the bank and tower in front of it; the ships, necessarily for the effect, but fatally for themselves, are confused, and incompletely ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... humble Ghetto garret. Against all reasoning, she continued to feel something antipathetic in Henry's clothes and even in his occupation—perhaps it was really the subconscious antagonism of the old clo' and the new, subtly symbolic of the old generation and the smart new world springing up to tread it down. Henry himself was secretly pleased at her refusal. In the first ardours of courtship he had consented to swallow even the Polish crone who had strangely mothered his buxom British ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... massed around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic, sacrificial flames—a throng of emancipated workers, of toilers from whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful menace ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... for the purpose of our investigation. The religious organizations have for their sole aim the deepening of the religious impulse, and the missionary objective of carrying this impulse to others. The semi-religious are built around religious and symbolic heroes, make a bid for the heroic and the gang spirit, and seek to inculcate more or less of religious truth by the sugar-coat method. The welfare type aims at the giving of all sorts of activity in order to keep the boy interested and busy, and so raise the tone of ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition. The dancers flourished their knives, threw long sharp-pointed sticks forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving apparatus. The women always ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... had come straight back from the Soho Registry Office with the young woman whom he had quixotically drawn up out of a world—the nether world—where she had been happier than she could ever hope to become with him. For Kitty Brawle—her very surname was symbolic—was one of those doomed creatures who love the mud, who never really wish to leave the mud—who feel scraped and ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... seen by reference to Fig. 217 that the painted figures are partially pictorial, the conventional scenes including the sun, the moon, and stars. The more conventional parts of the design are very curious and without doubt are symbolic. The border of fret work is Mexican in style. The sun, which is only partially exposed above the horizon, is outlined in red and is surrounded by red rays. The figures supposed to represent the moon and the stars are in black. In the illustration the reds of the original are represented by vertical ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... also consider that their paintings and sculptures were eminently symbolic. When one carves an explanation in hard granite it is apt to be done in shorthand, as it were. Thus, a tree meant a forest, a prisoner meant a whole army; therefore, two sculptured harpists or flute players may stand for twenty or two hundred. Athenaeus, who lived at the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... enough to the minds of the mate and myself. We sat down for a regular pow-wow beside the fire sputtering in the open room, from which thick smoke crept up the face of the rock, and hung over us in a material but symbolic cloud. It was naturally cold. The man began with a plea for some "clodin." We began with a plea for some children. How many would he swap for a start in clothing and "tings for his winter"? He picked out and gave us Jimmie. The soft-hearted mate, on whose cheeks the tears were literally standing, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... scene verily was, and how witnessed, it will not take long to tell; nor will the tale be useless: but I must first refer the reader to a period preceding, by nearly a century, the great symbolic action under the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... full of fantastic plants in beds, bushes and pots. On the left of the large drawing-room was the dining-room, with white varnished walls divided into squares by gold beading, and decorated by a number of bright pictures of symbolic female figures representing various kinds of wine. A gigantic porcelain stove filled one end of the room, and a sideboard the other. Through the dining-room was a smoking-room furnished with Smyrna carpets, low ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical—to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 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 ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... nearly square block of marble supported on a solid central column ornamented with horizontal mouldings, with four disengaged pillars of lesser diameter, with "cable" mouldings, at each corner. The spandrels of the top are decorated with carved symbolic subjects, leaves and flowers on two sides, and on the other two doves drinking from vases out of which issue crosses, typifying baptism, it is said. It is rather curious that the artist has disregarded the usual symmetry, and filled ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... with some verisimilitude, and yet with a symbolic syncopation that indicated the Lion Dance was a very ancient and conventional ceremony. These dancers gave way to a chorus of singers. For interminable hours, so it seemed, they chanted a high, shrill recitative, carried in fugue by deeper ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... Christianity is thus a life, we cannot stereotype its expressions in set and final forms. If it is a life in fellowship with the living God, it will think new thoughts, build new organizations, expand into new symbolic expressions. We cannot at any given time write "finis" after its development. We can no more "keep the faith" by stopping its growth than we can keep a son by insisting on his being forever a child. The progressiveness of Christianity is not simply its response ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... often used in Logic instead of concrete terms, not only in Symbolic Logic where the science is treated algebraically (as by Dr. Venn in his Symbolic Logic), but in ordinary manuals; so that it may be well to explain the use of them before ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 143-152. The author gives the dogmatic import of the life of Jesus, criticising the Christology of Orthodoxy, of Rationalism, of Schleiermacher, the Symbolic of Kant and De Wette, the Hegelian; ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... a well worn commonplace in Moslem folk-lore; but commentators cannnot agree whether "Jam" be a mirror or a cup. In the latter sense it would represent the Cyathomantic cup of the Patriarch Joseph and the symbolic bowl of Nestor. Jamshid may be translated either Jam the Bright or the Cup of the Sun: this ancient King is Solomon of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... was indeed 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, and, taking upon it the duties of a battering-ram, had charged ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... We shall not be content to think reverential thoughts, but we shall say, or even sing, great things of God's greatness and our indebtedness and duty: such a vocal exercise is psalmody. We shall represent in symbolic action our dependence on the Lord of life and death, and also our sinfulness, for which He might justly strike us dead: ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... privilege of sanctuary. 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 Davenant, what ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... on Evariste's arm, was strolling with him about the Champ de la Federation. Workmen were hastily completing their task of erecting columns, statues, temples, a "mountain," an altar of the Fatherland. Huge symbolic figures, Hercules (representing the people) brandishing his club, Nature suckling the Universe from her inexhaustible breasts, were rising at a moment's notice in the capital that, tortured by famine and fear, was listening for the dreaded sound of the Austrian ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... description or narrative. The first case is much simpler than the second. For there is a fixed relation between certain physical appearances and the causes which produced them; and this relation, governed by physical laws, is known to us.[59] But a psychological trace, on the other hand, is purely symbolic: it is not the fact itself; it is not even the immediate impression made by the fact upon the witness's mind, but only a conventional symbol of that impression. Written documents, then, are not, as material documents are, valuable ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... school was introduced from India and it follows that its theories and practices were openly advocated at this period and probably were not of repute much earlier. It is akin to the Buddhism of Tibet and may be described in its higher aspects as an elaborate and symbolic pantheism, which represents the one spirit manifesting himself in a series of emanations and reflexes. In its popular and unfortunately commoner aspect it is simply polytheism, fetichism and magic. In many respects it resembles the Pure Land school. Its principal ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... right to hand them over. But over us he had no authority; we are the tigers of the jungle and have never been tamed." He had frequently threatened to attack the fort; and when he had sent to the Resident a message to that effect in the usual symbolic language, the latter's only reply had been to go up to his house with two or three men only, and to spend five days there as Aban Jau's guest, and to persuade him to come down to ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... who promptly provided a large brass dinnerbell. At six o'clock the next morning two students, side by side, walked through all the corridors, ringing the rising-bell,—an act, as Miss Eastman says, symbolic of the inner awakening to come to all those girls." Thirty-nine years later, at the sound of a bell in the early morning, the household were to awake to duty for the last time in the great building. The ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... has been in all countries so felt as to cause its acceptance everywhere for the most perfect physical type of womanhood;—and that the characteristic fruit of the tribe is so sweet, that it has become symbolic at once of the subtlest temptation, and the kindest ministry to the earthly passion of the human race. "Comfort me with apples, for ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... felt to be magnificent indeed. The little incident said more for the richness of Minook than all the General's blowing; they forgot that what was lost would amount to less than fifty cents. The fact that it was gold—Minook gold—gave it a symbolic value not to ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... 358. I believe it is not known with certainty at what time the painters first introduced the luminous circle round the head to import a Saint or holy person. It is now become a part of the symbolic language of painting, and it is much to be wished that this kind of hieroglyphic character was more frequent in that art; as it is much wanted to render historic pictures both more intelligible, and more sublime; and why should not painting as well as poetry express ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it certain. The "No"—her first word to him at their first meeting—resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise, hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get an interview with her face ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hard to say that this one affects us as crimson does, that other as blue does. And yet we can see, I think, that by chasing our impressions to their source, there might be some way of presenting them in symbolic form. There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks, or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down even in a single hieroglyph, of which the elements would be such as should convey to something in us behind the intellect ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... stupefy our senses, lights candles to obscure our sight, amuses the masses with buffooneries to prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality, and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. Satan in all his shapes and forms as he rules the world has been described by Goethe as Egotism. Selfishness is his element and real nature. Selfishness not yet realizing ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Hindu practices. They observe the Diwali, Rakshabandhan and Holi festivals; they say that at the Diwali the last Tirthakar Mahavira attained beatitude and the gods rained down jewels; the little lamps now lighted at Diwali are held to be symbolic of these jewels. They tie the threads round the wrist on Rakshabandhan to keep off evil spirits. They worship Sitala Devi, the Hindu goddess of smallpox, and employ Brahmans to choose names for their children and fix the dates of their ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... symbolic stories in the beginning of the Bible there is one about a tower built with such vertical energy as to take a hold on heaven, but ruined and resulting only in a confusion of tongues. The story might be interpreted ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary, representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are but childish and half-civilized images—Mary as triumphant Queen, with the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with her dead Son across her knees. For ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... were now collected all the young people from within a radius of a couple of miles. The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wildflowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... attitudes. The names of trenches on the French front often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry possessed by simple peoples—the instinct that created the English ballads and the exquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints. Other trench names were symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had the "Trench of the Great Revenge," the "Trench of France," the "Trench of Aristide" (meaning Briand), ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... will die as I have lived, A long-nosed heathen playing with his scars, A pagan killed by weltschmerz ... I remember, Once when I stood with Hegel at a window, I, being full of bubbling youth and coffee, Spoke in symbolic tropes about the stars. Something I said about "those high Abodes of all the blest" provoked his temper. "Abodes? The stars?" He froze me with a sneer, "A light eruption on the firmament." "But," cried romantic I, "is there no sphere ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... reactions is hardly subject to doubt, yet in no instance is it possible to establish with certainty that a given reaction is of this type, for in no instance can a remote, or an imagined, or a merely symbolic relationship between stimulus and reaction be positively excluded. Some, indeed, would assert that some such relationship must necessarily exist in every instance, at least in the domain of the subconscious. This circumstance necessitates the placing of this ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... few who place any importance to the phenomena of sleep. Before we can begin to comprehend or even analyze dreams, whether our dreams are symbolic or otherwise, we must first divert from our mind our materialistic conceptions of what the individual called man really is. The external or physical man, is no more the man than the coat he wears. The physical man is only an instrument ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... the childish 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 reflections ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of the Lincoln Memorial and of a memorial bridge from the base of the Lincoln Monument to Arlington would be an appropriate and symbolic expression of the union of the North and the South at the Capital of the Nation. I urge upon Congress the appointment of a commission to undertake these national improvements, and to submit a plan for their execution; and when the plan has been submitted and approved, and the work carried ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... structures the noblest. Observed from the high palisades or the low bed of the Potomac, that ever-present object of view from any point of the District is veritably "a city on a hill that cannot be hid,"—symbolic and typical of her mission. And then the inquiry comes as to her significance. Why ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... reached a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We squatted and looked round. Some empty bottles were the only furniture. But on the wall hung the picture we had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, and perhaps as much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe. Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles and signs, and from them grew leaves and flowers of various hues. Below was a garden lit by a rising sun, and a black ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... with unseeing eyes; he was striving to grasp the symbolic significance of the incident, but it eluded him, and presently he returned to the library, where Jules Thessaly was glancing at a book which he had taken from a shelf ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... a great sin, but she had never worn a wig in her life, and putting on one now seemed to be out of the question. This hair of hers was of a dark-brown hue, threaded with silver, and it grew in a tousled abundance of unruly wisps that seemed to be symbolic of her harum-scarum character. She was as pugnacious as she was charitable, and as quick to make up a quarrel as to pick one. Her husband, Michael Minsker, was a "worldly" man, with only a smattering of Talmud, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Wild Duck, the garret which was the domain of Hedvig and of that symbolic bird. At Venstoeb, the infant Ibsen possessed a like retreat, a little room near the back entrance, which was sacred to him and into the fastness of which he was accustomed to bolt himself. Here ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the open window in a nightdress that she had found in one of the chests—a frail, yellowish thing with many frills of cobwebby lace made and worn by some dead woman on a forgotten bridal. It was symbolic of Hazel's whole life that she came in this way both to Undern and the Mountain—as bare of woman's regalia as a winter leaf is ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... suddenly enacting a role of dubious honour in improvised melodrama. Penrod, approaching, gave the pole a look of sharp suspicion, then one of conviction; slapped it lightly and contemptuously with his open hand; passed on a few paces, but turned abruptly, and, pointing his right forefinger, uttered the symbolic word, "Bing!" ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... urge most emphatically that, whatever may have been the original intention, and whatever may be the esoteric meaning, the millions that perform idolatrous practice in this country see nothing symbolic behind the image and take the whole show quite literally. And can anything be more degrading to an intelligent human being? We know that all religions are necessarily more or less anthropomorphic. But ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... woman," a character possessing certain attributes of the Earth-Mother. Speaking of certain ceremonies in which Ca-li-ko, the corn-goddess, figures, he calls attention to the fact that "in initiations an ear of corn is given to the novice as a symbolic representation of mother. The corn is the mother of all initiated persons of the tribe" (389 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... declared that there is one domain for the 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: "A11 civilization ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... at his 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 sandy ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... while Bob and Archie with shaven heads prostrated themselves before the sundial. Miss Atherley might possibly dance the Fire-dance upon the east lawn, while Mr Atherley stood upon one foot in the middle of the herbaceous border and played upon her with the garden hose. These or other symbolic rites we should perform, before we planted it in a place chosen by Chance. Then leaving a saucer of new milk for it lest it should thirst in the night we would go away, and spend the rest ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... hollow extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher's ultra-royalism, how carefully does Shakspeare acknowledge and reverence the eternal distinction between the mere individual, and the symbolic or representative, on which all genial law, no less than patriotism, depends. The whole of this second scene commences, and is anticipative of, the tone and character of the play ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... "gift" and impressed most of those who came in contact with him with his apparent sincerity. If he duped others, it seemed he also duped himself. Moreover, and this was perhaps the secret of his continued success, his "visions" were invariably symbolic and mysterious; they possessed an adaptability of character that was truly Delphic. Indeed, his hearers were compelled to put their own interpretation upon his visions. The seer seldom pretended to understand or explain ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... performers. Their enormous masks represented different deities, and each bore upon its forehead "the third eye." At their head marched Thlogan-Poudma-Jungnas (literally "he who was born in the lotus flower"). Another richly dressed mask marched beside him, carrying a yellow parasol covered with symbolic designs. His suite was composed of gods, in magnificent costumes; Dorje-Trolong and Sangspa-Kourpo (i.e., Brahma himself), and others. These masks, as a lama sitting near me explained to us, represented six classes of beings subject to the metamorphoses; the gods, the ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... the enemy. She remained on the bank looking after him, mute and despondent,—a forlorn creature clothed in rags and emaciated with hunger, an outcast from all the tribes. She might have been regarded as a symbolic figure representing woman among the Indians, as she stood there with her bruised hands, throbbing with pain where the cruel blow had fallen, hanging, in sullen scorn of pain, uncared for by her side. So she stood watching ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... black; similar to the flag of Syria which has two green stars and of Iraq which has three green stars (plus an Arabic inscription) in a horizontal line centered in the white band; also similar to the flag of Egypt which has a symbolic eagle centered in ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... 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 ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... Louise's declaration in the duet with Julian—'Depuis le jour ou je me suis donnee!' One caught the whole intention of the composer in the few crystal notes—one figured the whole scene—the little house of love, the lovers in their Garden of Eden, and below Paris—symbolic Paris! ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Saxton, known throughout the interwoven sets of Brooklyn Heights as "Jeff." Jeff Saxton was thirty-nine to Claire's twenty-three. He was clean and busy; he had no signs of vice or humor. Especially for Jeff must have been invented the symbolic morning coat, the unwrinkable gray trousers, and the moral rimless spectacles. He was a graduate of a nice college, and he had a nice tenor and a nice family and nice hands and he was nicely successful in New York copper dealing. When he was ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can; but by all means we must affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion, which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... kindness to old Antony, whose heart will be sore at my departure? I had thought to bid her be silent concerning the vision; but as she declares the shining Knight was Saint George or Saint Michael, the nuns, in their devout simplicity, will doubtless hold the vision to have been merely symbolic of my removal to ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay |
