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

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks /

Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent.

Isidore of Seville /

Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent.

Everything that happens is a symbol.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe /

symbol

My thought is part of the meaning of the world, and hence I use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought.

Henry David Thoreau - Journal /

One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.

Ferdinand de Saussure - Course in General Linguistics /

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du mal /

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

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word 'water' is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.

Immanuel Kant /