Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Symbols are important.

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

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

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

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

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

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's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

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

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

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

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

It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

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

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Language is memory and metaphor.