Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Image is an international language.

I believe that eyes are very important motifs. That's something that can discern the peace and love.

The image is an image.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.

Sometimes art imitates life.

Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract - like the mathematical - is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.

For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented.

I'm drawn to silhouettes because of their emblematic rather than their illustrational quality. I see them as shapes, allowing an image to become an abstraction and for pure painting to take place.

We love displays and symbols and stuff that quickly and silently tells the world who we are. Better yet, we love visual reminders of who we want to be.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

Photos should suggest a word(s) and vice versa. They should be equal and interchangeable.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

I never consciously place symbolism in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to get the subconscious to do the work for you, and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural. During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level and need only be summoned in the heat of writing.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

We started an organization that's the only sub-organization of the MacArthur Foundation and we are called the Macarturos. Usually when I win something, I'm the only one of my ethnicity to get it, but this time I met all these Latinos, and I was so excited. I'd meet someone and I'd go, [...] "Can you come to San Antonio?" And they'd go, "Oh yeah." [...] And suddenly I had twelve people that said they would come. And I didn't know how it was going to be. And that's how the Macarturos became a reality, where these very generous geniuses come to San Antonio and work together.