Neale Donald Walsch Quotes

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

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.

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what your experience of God differs from what you've heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.

Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.

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 .

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

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

I'm writing about emotions.

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.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

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

Symbols are important.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

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

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.