Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn't understand it.

Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.

The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.