Semiotics

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."

"Real talk between a man and a woman offers the supreme privilege of keeping the other sane, and being kept sane by the other."

"But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much."

"Words learn'd by rote a parrot may rehearse, But talking is not always to converse, Not more distinct from harmony divine The constant creaking of a country sign."

"The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine. Nobody, or hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for truth, how can anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or Nature-fact of any kind; a Human Doer especially, who is the most complex, profound, and inarticulate of all Nature's Facts? Nobody can recognize him: till once he is patented, get some public stamp of authenticity, and has been articulately proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul, direct from Heaven,—how shall any excellence of man become recognizable to this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and placarding itself as excellent,—which, I reckon, it above other things will probably be in no great haste to do."

"With vollies of eternal babble."

"But still his tongue ran on, the less Of weight it bore, with greater ease."

"A disciple should not seek the Teacher’s company for the sake of discourses, stanzas, and expositions. ... But such talk as deals with effacement, as favors the mind’s release, and which leads to complete disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, peace, direct knowledge, enlightenment, and Nibbāna, that is, talk on wanting little, on contentment, seclusion, aloofness from society, arousing energy, virtue, collectedness, wisdom, deliverance, knowledge and vision of deliverance: for the sake of such talk a disciple should seek the Teacher’s company even if he is told to go away."

"When a monk abides [in equanimity], if his mind inclines to talking, he resolves: ‘Such talk as is low, vulgar, coarse, ignoble, unbeneficial, and which does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, peace, direct knowledge, enlightenment, and Nibbāna, that is, talk of kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, battles, food, drink, clothing, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, vehicles, villages, towns, cities, countries, women, heroes, streets, wells, the dead, trivialities, the origin of the world, the origin of the sea, whether things are so or are not so: such talk I shall not utter.’"

"Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such unedifying conversation as about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, carriages, villages, towns and cities, countries, women, heroes, street- and well-gossip, talk of the departed, desultory chat, speculations about land and sea, talk about being and non-being, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such conversation."

"DISCUSSION, n. A method of confirming others in their errors."

"It would talk; Lord, how it talked!"

"If he be not in love with some woman, there is no believing old signs: a' brushes his hat o' mornings; what should that bode?"

"Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon 't, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs; They are black vesper's pageants."

"All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind, As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves."

"It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested."

"Science sees signs; Poetry the thing signified."

"With crosses, relics, crucifixes, Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pixes; The tools of working out salvation By mere mechanic operation."

"In a book called Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead points out that perception is usually a matter of symbols, just like language; I say I see a book when I actually see a red oblong. The Transactionists (who have been influenced by Whitehead rather than Husserl) take this one stage further, and point out that when I 'perceive' something, I am actually making a bet with myself that what I perceive is what I think it is. In order to act and live at all, I have to make these bets; I cannot afford to make absolutely certain that things are what I think they are. But this means that we should not take our perceptions at face value, any more than Nietzsche was willing to take philosophy at its face value; we must allow for prejudice and distortion."

"Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science. And yet, if one were to give oneself the trouble, one could easily find, in certain parts at least of contemporary mathematics... symbols as clear, as beautiful, and as full of spiritual meaning as that of the circle and mediation. From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it."

"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."

"Promethea: Don't worry, some symbols always means the same thing...and the archetype of wisdom is eternal."

"It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge."

"All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word "spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe."

"In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex)."

"Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth."

"Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide. The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel, formerly used to kill men, but here In the sense of a symbol."

"I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive, But this; bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness joined with final Disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon’s Realist eyes and act Married to the massive Mysticism of stone, Which failure cannot cast down Nor success make proud."

"We often dismiss controversies or concerns by waving our hands and saying something like, “Oh, that’s merely symbolic,” as if the meaning we give to symbols is somehow irrelevant compared with more tangible things. But symbolism — the way we reduce broad concerns, agendas, and visions to images or rituals — has played a defining role in human life since there have been humans. Try burning a flag or a cross in front of the wrong audience and then tell me symbolism is nothing."

"We are symbols, and inhabit symbols."

"King Arthur had a dream, too. Of a world where might served right, instead of subjugating it. His knights of the Round Table were the agents of that dream … and his sword, Excalibur, the Symbol of it. He died, the table was destroyed, his knights mostly slain — yet the dream survived. They became legend — and the sword, the means of keeping the legend alive and vital through the ages. … The sword Excalibur, represented Hope. It was light in the darkness of fear and ignorance and hate. Do we want — have we the right — to snuff it out?"

"[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction."

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or s."

"Symbols in American Indian systems are not symbolic in the usual sense of the word. The words articulate reality—not “psychological” or imagined reality, not emotive reality captured metaphorically in an attempt to fuse thought and feeling, but that reality where thought and feeling are one, where objective and subjective are one, where speaker and listener are one, where sound and sense are one."

"In a sense, the American Indian perceives all that exists as symbolic. This outlook has given currency to the concept of the Indian as one who is close to the earth, but the closeness is actual, not a quaint result of savagism or childlike naiveté. An Indian, at the deepest level of being, assumes that the earth is alive in the same sense that human beings are alive. This aliveness is seen in nonphysical terms, in terms that are perhaps familiar to the mystic or the psychic, and this view gives rise to a metaphysical sense of reality that is an ineradicable part of Indian awareness. In brief, we can say that the sun or the earth or a tree is a symbol of an extraordinary truth."

"We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. To you symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book. To us they are part of nature, part of ourselves, even little insects like ants and grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us the meaning."

"I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other."

"In all labor there is profit, ​But idle chatter leads only to poverty."

"It is not for minds like ours to give or to receive flattery; yet the praises of sincerity have ever been permitted to the voice of friendship."

"The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working."

"No person will sit with patience to hear any one praised for more than five minutes, but a commentator on others' defects will have willing listeners, and the minutes will not be counted."

"Praise enough To fill the ambition of a private man, That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue."

"The love of praise, howe'er conceal'd by art, Reigns more or less, and glows, in ev'ry heart."

"The most pleasing of all sounds that of your own praise."

"With faint praises one another damn."

"We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud And magnify Thy name, Almighty God! But Man is Thy most awful instrument, In working out a pure intent."

"Id facere laus est quod decet, non quod licet."

"Praise undeserved is scandal in disguise."

"Solid pudding against empty praise."

"Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed."