Richard Rohr Quotes

When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.

Authentic spiritual authority is what puts you in touch with reality.

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 I do is a metaphor of the universal order.

But even in the Christian religion, much of its real meaning is hidden by words that are misleading and symbols that but few understand.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

Life is like an analogy.

Tarot is just stories on cards.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

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.

With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.

I always look for characters that will hopefully develop into a more powerful symbol.

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.

Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.

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

Some have supposed that the mosquito is of a devout turn, and never will partake of a meal without first saying grace. The devotions of some men are but a preface to blood-sucking.

God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.