Robert Wilson Quotes

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

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

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.

All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

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

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.

I don't like allegory.

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.

Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.

Philosophers are best able to understand properly the allegorical passages of the Koran on the basis of their logical training. There is no religious stipulation that all such passages have to be interpreted literally.

Symbols are important.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Good sci-fi and fantasy use fantastical situations to represent real-life issues. It really is all a metaphor for what we all go through as humans.

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

You can be very honest without telling the truth, at least in art.