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Symbolic   Listen
noun
Symbolic  n.  (Theol.) See Symbolics.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Symbolic" Quotes from Famous Books



... a sort of devotional instinct, and were soon wholly absorbed in their prayers and prostrations. It is very evident to me that the Russian race requires the formulas of the Eastern Church; a fondness for symbolic ceremonies and observances is far more natural to its character than to the nations of Latin or Saxon blood. In Southern Europe the peasant will exchange merry salutations while dipping his fingers in the holy water, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... is symbolic of the opportunity offered to the world to educate its youth in San Francisco. Within short motor rides from the city are three big universities. In addition to the University of California at Berkeley, which has one of the largest ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood

... they died, massed around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic, sacrificial flames—a throng of emancipated workers, of toilers from whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... feminine consideration in Finlay's eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any significance. Woman in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an initiation to perceive her—a process to which Finlay would have been as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute of ideals about women—they would have formed in that case a strange ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... in the study of ancient American pottery, I consider the collection invaluable, as it can scarcely be possible that the forms and decorations contain nothing that has been handed down from a former age. Although the figures used have no symbolic characters connected with them in the mind of the modern artist, yet it is more than probable that at least some of them did have such a meaning to the ancient artists. For example, the little tadpole-shaped ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson

... Baptist; the Baptism of the eunuch; St. Philip, the deacon; and the Baptism of Christ. In the center of the room stands the font upon an octagonal base of two steps. Its pedestal and bowl are traced with symbolic carvings. Over it is a canopy of elaborately carved mahogany drawn into a spire bearing a gold crown, studded with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... symbolic of the new strength that was to come out of the West, made their journey across continent by automobile. They created a sensation all along the way, received as they were by governors, by mayors, by officials high and low, and by the populace. Thousands more added their ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... when the uprising gave promise of victory to the insurgents, Bakounin decided that he must go and, to do so, that he must have money. Bakounin then wrote to his wealthy young disciple, Cafiero, in a symbolic language which they had worked out between them, declaring his intention of going to Spain and asking him to furnish the necessary money for his expenses. As usual, Bakounin became melodramatic in ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... carts full of them; the most popular being the one that represents the livid and cunning muzzle, contracted as by a deathlike grimace, the long straight ears, sharp-pointed teeth of the white fox, sacred to the God of Rice. There are also others symbolic of gods or monsters, livid, grimacing, convulsed, with wigs and beards of natural hair. All manner of folk, even children, purchase these horrors, and fasten them over their faces. Every sort of instrument is for sale, amongst ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... sometimes disreputable but nearly always unworldly; more distinguished by an intuitive and childlike than by an ingenious or sophisticated quality of mind. Ideas and facts are perceived by them not abstractly nor practically, but in their typical or symbolic, hence their pictorial and transmissible, aspects. They read dogma, whether theological or other, in the terms of a living process, unconsciously translating it, as they go along, out of its cold propositions into its appropriate forms of feeling ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... like the one in which Elena had received him two years ago, seemed to him tragic and sinister. These were, perhaps, the very same hangings that had heard Elena say to him that day, 'I love you.' The book-case was open, and he could see the rows of obscene books, the bizarre bindings stamped with symbolic decorations. On the wall hung the portrait of Lady Heathfield side by side with a copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Nelly O'Brien. And the two women looked out of the canvas with the same, self-same piercing intensity, the same glow of passion, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... scientific "criticism of life" presents itself to us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... other things of a celebrated nature, famous at home and abroad: but his peculiar feat, which had commended him at Reinsberg, was an Edition of HORACE: exquisite old FLACCUS brought to perfection, as it were; all done with vignettes, classical borderings, symbolic marginal ornaments, in fine taste and accuracy, the Text itself engraved; all by the exquisite burin of Pine. ["London, 1737" (Biographie Universelle, xxxiv. 465).] This Edition had come out last year, famous over the world; and was by and by, as rumor bore, to be followed by a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

... us is that which may yet be derived from Chaldean sources. This sacerdotal caste were the most perfect in their astral conceptions and complete in their symbolic system of recording, and if the great work found in King Sargon's library in seventy tablets is ever translated, it will prove of priceless value to the student of these weird, but ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... organist," for it was written, we are told, almost at a single sitting, entirely within two days. The theme may have been suggested by Tennyson's Sir Galahad, but his familiarity with the old romances and his love of the mystical and symbolic sense of these good old-time tales were a quite ample source for such suggestion. Moreover Lowell in his early years was much given to seeing visions and dreaming dreams. "During that part of my life," ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... the great artist Nature bent upon the creation of a soul which should hold in subtlest perfection of consciousness every element essential to the successive ideals of maiden, wife, mother, and the soul of this girl is pictured. Her religion of beauty was the symbolic expression of instincts wholly chaste; her body was to her a temple which preserved a sacred flame, and she could not conceive existence if once the shrine had suffered desecration. We are apt to attribute to women indiscriminately ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... democracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan of this interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Built by the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the larger uses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of this particular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The cross is divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries and mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in its upper stages, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... lighten"; the emblem in the shield is a tiny lamp such as may burn in the poorest homes in India. Below the lamp is a sunflower, whose meaning has been discussed in the college magazine by a new student. She says, "To-day the sunflower stands for very much in my mind. It is symbolic of this our College, for, as our amateur botanists tell us, the sunflower is not a flower, but a congregation of them. The tiny buds in the centre are our budding intellects. To-day they are in the making; to-morrow they will bloom like their ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, close-folded, mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting for the second ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... that score; the family is extinct. The last Count of Spada, moreover, made me his heir, bequeathing to me this symbolic breviary, he bequeathed to me all it contained; no, no, make your mind satisfied on that point. If we lay hands on this fortune, we may enjoy ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... should murmur, "is Life. There are two symbolic figures,—Pat and the Other. The artist, with relentless sincerity, refuses to allow our attention to be distracted by the introduction of any characters unconnected with the sordid tragedy. Here is human ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... our goddess of learning is Saraswati. My audience in the West, I am sure, will be glad to know that her complexion is white. But the signal fact is that she is living and she is a woman, and her seat is on a lotus-flower. The symbolic meaning of this is, that she dwells in the centre of life and the heart of all existence, which opens itself in beauty to ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... firm root in his hitherto unstable mind. He laid siege to Noteburg, where he found a garrison of only four hundred fifty men, and on December 11, 1702, he rechristened the little fortress he had captured, by a new and symbolic name, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... my symbolic marking. But tell me, Atoka, was not your sister with two white women on ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... time and money and ambition as nothing. But a dream, or a cloud in the sky, or a bird flying across the trail from the wrong direction, or a change of the wind will challenge their deepest thoughts. To the Indian mind all signs are symbolic. Their ceremonies are as complicated as any of ancient Hebrew or Greek tradition. The Indian aspires to be a great hunter, he seeks fame as a noble warrior; he struggles for the eagle feathers of distinction, but ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... to exploit his "gift" and impressed most of those who came in contact with him with his apparent sincerity. If he duped others, it seemed he also duped himself. Moreover, and this was perhaps the secret of his continued success, his "visions" were invariably symbolic and mysterious; they possessed an adaptability of character that was truly Delphic. Indeed, his hearers were compelled to put their own interpretation upon his visions. The seer seldom pretended to understand or ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... to heaven, whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... performance of her spiritual duties. On Sunday mornings there was the dinner to think about. She still liked to cook the great weekly feast herself. Moreover, after six days of genuine labor, Sunday's fundamental purport as a day of rest is apt to overshadow its symbolic aspects as a day set apart for communion with things impalpable. The Abbey Church was too far off, even if it had not been out of the question for other reasons. It required a walk of two fat miles to get to Rodchurch, and one had to start early if one did not want ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde

... the soul, and destroyed every base and petty thought that was there. Clergy, headed by a bishop, were walking down the cathedral. At the huge doors, nearly lost in the heavy twilight of November noon, they stopped, turned and came back. The coffin swayed into view, covered with the sacred symbolic bunting, and borne on the shoulders of eight sergeants of the old regiments of the dead man. Then followed the pall-bearers—five field-marshals, five full generals, and two admirals; aged men, and some of them had reached the highest dignity without ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... past is as free from contaminating experience as is her own. When, therefore, she obtains proof to the contrary, in an indignant revulsion of feeling, she hurls her glove in his face and breaks the engagement. This act is, I fancy, intended to be half symbolic. The young girl expresses not only her personal sense of outrage; but she flings a challenge in the face of the whole community, which by its indulgence made his transgression easy. She discovers ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the attention. I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this sort of symbolic representation. Play has its dangers also—very serious ones. The adults sometimes set bad examples. The game gives practise in cunning no less than in forbearance. Possibly the best service of observation just now is to gather the facts with a view to the proper recognition ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... this Temple of Jimjambo. There were mystic altars with seven veils before them, and thru these the Chief Magistrian would appear, clad in a long cream-colored robe with gold and purple borders, and with pink embroidered slippers and symbolic head-dress. His lectures and religious rites had been attended by hundreds—many of them rich society women, who came rolling up to the temple in their limousines. Also there had been a school, where children had been initiated into the mystic rites of the cult. The prophet would take these ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair

... pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be hallowed for ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... colloquy, Half humorous, with undertones of pathos, Half grave, half flippant . . . while her fingers, softly, Felt for this tune, played it and let it fall, Now note by singing note, now chord by chord, Repeating phrases with a kind of pleasure . . . Was it symbolic of the woman's weakness That she could neither break it—nor conclude? It paused . . . and wandered . . . paused again; while she, Perplexed and tired, half told me I must go,— Half asked me if I thought I ought ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken

... high minister Of spirit's joys, was his, reserved, restrained. His song was like the sword Excalibur Of his symbolic knight; trenchant, unstained. It shook the world of wordly baseness, smote The Christless heathendom of huckstering days. There is no harshness in that mellow note, No blot upon those bays; For loyal love and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various

... nothing, but looked very stern and sad. The contrast between those two men, one so rebellious, the other so grimly enduring, both so shabby and war-worn, and those splendidly fresh boys outside, seemed to me the most utterly symbolic episode imaginable. There was ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... said smiling apologetically, and giving her hat a tug of determination symbolic of her being ready for anything, especially America. "I think I must have gone to sleep. Have you—" she hesitated and dropped her voice. "Are they—are the Clouston Sacks ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... to that life again. Looking back, I see its intolerable narrowness, its petty smugness. By comparison it's like the relative clearness of the atmosphere there and here. There, perhaps I could see a few miles: here, I look away over leagues and leagues of distance. It's symbolic." The voice paused; the face, turned directly toward his companion's, tried in the half-darkness to read its expression. "I've been in this prairie country long enough now to realize that financially ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... principle of interpretation, Mr. Hartland is mainly concerned with the traces of primitive thought and custom to be seen in the Swan Maidens. Originally these were, according to him, probably regarded as actual swans, the feathery robe being a later symbolic euphemism, though I would incidentally remark that the whole of the story as a story depends upon the seizure of a separate dress involving the capture of the swan bride. Mr. Hartland is inclined to believe partly with F. Liebrecht ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

... copes for solemn occasions, and graceful chasubles on which embroidered flowers surrounded symbolic letters on a yellowish ground, which had become cream-colored, although it had originally been white. Some second-hand dealers were there, two or three men with dirty beards, and a fat woman with a big stomach, one of those women who deal in second-hand ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... formal parapet at the end of the basin of water, sixty feet from the fountain, is a colossal figure symbolic of the setting sun, Helios, the great orb having thrown off the nebulous mass that subsequently resolved ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus

... acquisitive patron of the renaissance, Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, for her famous "Grotta." The artist's slovenly execution of the work brought him a well-deserved rebuke from the Marchioness. 1261, by Lorenzo Costa, a flattering symbolic representation of the Court at Mantua was also painted for her. Isabella, to whom a Cupid hands a laurel crown, is seen standing near a grove of trees, surrounded by poets ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... concepts to communicate it, we tend to make these in themselves mean something, whereas they are but counters or symbols used to express what is their inspiration—Intuition. Hence we often forget the metaphysical Intuitions from which science itself has sprung. What is relative in science is the symbolic knowledge, reached by pre-existing concepts which proceed from the fixed to the moving. A truly intuitive philosophy would bring science and metaphysics together. Modern science dates from the day when mobility was set up as an independent reality and studied as such by Galileo. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... the Cours de Composition musicale M. d'Indy speaks of "the admirable initial T in the Rouleau mortuaire of Saint-Vital (twelfth century), which represents Satan vomiting two Jews ... an expressive and symbolic work of art, if ever there was one." I should not mention this but for the fact that there are only two illustrations in the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... friendship you are giving to Mexico and the people of the state of Jalisco. The people of this state believe that the best way to take part in this labor is to tell you through me: "Welcome be the noble emissary who, like the dove of the ark, brings the symbolic olive branch which announces that clouds have been dissipated and the sun of friendship is rising between the peoples ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... notable instance of Roman superficiality, incuriousness and ignorance. Every old Egyptian city had its idols (images of metal, stone or wood), in which the Deity became incarnate as in the Catholic host; besides its own symbolic animal used as a Kiblah or prayer-direction (Jerusalem or Meccah), the visible means of fixing and concentrating the thoughts of the vulgar, like the crystal of the hypnotist or the disk of the electro-biologist. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... picture. The mingling, in the dress, of extreme simplicity with the cunningest artifice, and the greater daring and joie de vivre which it expressed, as compared with the dress of pre-war days, made it characteristic and symbolic:—a dress ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... nearly square block of marble supported on a solid central column ornamented with horizontal mouldings, with four disengaged pillars of lesser diameter, with "cable" mouldings, at each corner. The spandrels of the top are decorated with carved symbolic subjects, leaves and flowers on two sides, and on the other two doves drinking from vases out of which issue crosses, typifying baptism, it is said. It is rather curious that the artist has disregarded ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant

... transfigure the familiar things of life in glorious haste and inspiration? While following his rules and habits my father was constantly attended by the rapturous spirit of such a genius, transmuting swarming reality into a few symbolic types. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... Shakespeare, to obtain some notion of that system of the universe from which they drew so many of their analogies. The symbolism of Dante appears to us unnaturally strained until we know that the science of his day saw everything as symbolic. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... which these counter-spells were performed are indicated by the words, and they are ceremonies of the same kind as those with which spells are performed: they are symbolic actions, that is to say, actions which express by gesture the same meaning and intention as are expressed by the words. Thus, ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons

... hesitation in accepting Cervantes' verdict on Amadis de Gaula as the "best of all the books of this kind that have ever been written.'' It is the prose epic of feudalism, and its romantic spirit, its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its flowing style have entranced readers of such various types as Francis I. and Charles V., Ariosto ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... "It's symbolic, isn't it?" said Gregory. "It will stay here, I suppose, as long as Madame von Marwitz and Karen go on caring for each other. With all my griefs and suspicions I hope that the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... incoherent reactions is hardly subject to doubt, yet in no instance is it possible to establish with certainty that a given reaction is of this type, for in no instance can a remote, or an imagined, or a merely symbolic relationship between stimulus and reaction be positively excluded. Some, indeed, would assert that some such relationship must necessarily exist in every instance, at least in the domain of the subconscious. This circumstance necessitates the placing of this type of ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent

... in the world who lack subjective strength, material or spiritual, and hence they fail to receive dreams, however symbolic, because there is no power within them ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... mind of the sufferer—will seldom fail to discover the influence of sexual forces and sexual attractions which, while capable of causing disorders of mind and of conduct, show themselves only obscurely and indirectly, as, for example, in dreams or in symbolic form. ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:—the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... What had he to do with the Christians? He, who had watched his consecration-night in the temple of Isis; he, who had caught some sight of the Mysteries sacred to that goddess; he, who had worn the harsh linen robe and those symbolic robes in which a novice watches his dream-indicated night—what had he to do with Christians? Would that Timokles had observed the emperor's command that no one should become ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... 'long stone,' a megalithic monument. See Chapter II, "Menhirs and Dolmens." Students of folk-lore will recognize the symbolic significance of the offering. We seem to have here some connexion with pillar-worship, as found in ancient Crete, and the adoration of the Irminsul among ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... as she took up the veils, of which she alone knew the symbolic meaning; the white veil, the purple veil: each had its story to tell her; and the veil of burning scarlet. In a corner of the big room on a divan near the door she had seen the Spaniard, a handsome, swarthy figure in his well-fitting ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... palisade made of red-painted posts. Symbolic figures, tattooed on the wood, set forth the rank and achievements of the deceased. Strings of amulets, made of shells or cut stones, hung from one part to another. In the interior, the ground was carpeted with green leaves, and in the ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... coffin. All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from earth—records how shadowy! and dropped into darkness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its home; it has disappeared from all eyes but those that look down into the abyss of the grave. The sacristan stands ready, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... as part of a journey to the heavenly city was, I think, one of these discoveries; and its rite was the church procession to the altar. In symbolic act man learned to make the journey beyond the blank horizon. He enlarged the church procession to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he enlarged the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the pilgrimage of life itself. In the understanding of life as a pilgrimage, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... expression, and produce a whole which goes to the heart like a beautiful piece of music, and satisfies the mind—like one of those ancient Greek gems which, in a small space, presents engraved images symbolic of sublime ideas ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)

... at full speed and with a frightful final upward spring upon my waistcoat, at least once at each of our meetings. He had neglected that ceremony this time notwithstanding my correct and even conventional conduct in offering him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation from the Fyne household. And I remembered against him how on a certain day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral—who ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... messenger went to the village to beg help of Mrs. Horton (the mother of the professor of Greek), who promptly provided a large brass dinnerbell. At six o'clock the next morning two students, side by side, walked through all the corridors, ringing the rising-bell,—an act, as Miss Eastman says, symbolic of the inner awakening to come to all those girls." Thirty-nine years later, at the sound of a bell in the early morning, the household were to awake to duty for the last time in the great building. The unquestioning obedience, the prompt intelligence, the unconscious selflessness with which ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse

... said. "As a Lottery winner, you will take part in the symbolic ceremony of the Hunt, which marks the beginning of the yearly Games. The Hunt, as you may know, personifies our Omegan way of life. In the Hunt we see all the complex factors of the dramatic rise and fall from grace, combined ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... (give importance to) 642; call attention to &c. (attention) 457; give notice &c. (inform) 527. Adj. indicating &c. v., indicative, indicatory; denotative, connotative; diacritical, representative, typical, symbolic, pantomimic, pathognomonic[obs3], symptomatic, characteristic, demonstrative, diagnostic, exponential, emblematic, armorial; individual &c. (special) 79. known by, recognizable by; indicated &c. v.; pointed, marked. [Capable of being denoted] denotable[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... God is a Christian, whether he knows and confesses the Gospel or not. Faith does not consist in assent, but in inner transformation. The historical element in Christianity and its ceremonial observances are only the external form and garb (its "figure"), have merely a symbolic significance as media of communication, as forms of revelation for the eternal truth, proclaimed but not founded by Christ; the Bible is merely the shadow of the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... truest spirit, when we look upon them, as the instinct of devout hearts has ever done, as expressing both God's gift of temporal mercies, and His gift of spiritual good, of which higher gift all the lower are meant to be significant and symbolic. Thus regarded, the image describes the sweet rest of the soul in communion with God, in whom alone the hungry heart finds food that satisfies, and from whom alone the thirsty soul drinks draughts deep ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... as such, are echoes of waking life. There is something arbitrary in the way in which they are drawn from it. Every one feels that the same external cause may conjure up various dream-pictures. But they give symbolic expression to the feeling that one has something to ward off. The dream creates symbols; it is a symbolist. Inner experiences can also be transformed into such dream-symbols. A man dreams that a fire is crackling beside him; ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... hour, and upon this spot, put in place the corner-stone of the Capitol of the American Republic. The century rolls back, and we stand in the presence of the grandest and most imposing figure known to any age or country. Washington, as Grand Master of Free and Accepted Masons, clothed in the symbolic garments of that venerable Order, wearing the apron and the sash wrought by the hands of the wife of the beloved Lafayette, impressively and in accordance with the time-honored usages of that Order, is laying his hands upon the corner-stone of the future and permanent Capitol ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... by symbolic burial a man became regenerate, that he put off the old condition and entered into another that was new, by passing through the earth or a hole in the rocks, was very general, and it has continued to the present day in the modified form of enabling a sufferer by this means ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... that, whatever may have been the original intention, and whatever may be the esoteric meaning, the millions that perform idolatrous practice in this country see nothing symbolic behind the image and take the whole show quite literally. And can anything be more degrading to an intelligent human being? We know that all religions are necessarily more or less anthropomorphic. But our popular Hinduism surpasses everything else in this respect, too. There ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... the courage to cling stubbornly to his belief through every sort of mechanical vicissitude. This Mr. Bell did. June of 1876 was the year of the great Centennial at Philadelphia, the year that marked the first century of our country's progress. As the exhibition was to be one symbolic of our national development in every line, Mr. Bell decided to show his telephone there; to this end he set Watson, who was still at the Williams's shop, to making exhibition telephones of the two varieties they had ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... only does he excel the other in brief essay, depending only on endogenous forces, whereas Irving is always adorning his paragraphs with that herb-o'-grace, quotation, but he also greatly surpasses him in the construction of his stories; and finally, his psychological analysis and symbolic imagination place him beyond rivalry. It is a brilliant instance of the more ideal mind asserting its commanding power, by admirable achievements in the inferior styles,—so that even in those he was at once ranked with the most famous practiser of them,—and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox, or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it. Then an ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... wife of Ahab, king of Israel. Jezebel stands for the union of Paganism and Judaism. But Jezebel here represents a professed church of Christ. In Jezebel, therefore, you have a professed church of Christ in which there is a combination of Paganism and Judaism. This symbolic Jezebel teaches the servants of Christ to commit fornication—that is, not only identification with the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... but elegant and sought after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant

... coffee there was something symbolic and fitting to his mental state. It was agitated and thick, and impregnated with the peculiar flavour of country coffee. He swallowed but little, and resumed his march. At the first turning he passed the village school, whence issued a rhythmic but discordant ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... flat-chested and slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required. Mary Chivers's mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned. And the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closely girt as her figure. Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. There was good in the new ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... marble, Mme. B. possessing a beautiful piece of salty Parian found there, and shaped delicately, curved and bossy, into a perfect heart, the heart of a marble Artemis or Amazon. This the lazy Roman sea does, and it is surely an unusual feat: roll its shingle into vague shapes of symbolic hearts, hearts of serpentine, of jasper, of various beautiful rose and lilac breccias, of basalt, and of fine rose brick, all scattered on the glittering black sand (with funny mourning edges of violet shells), and in the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... formidable security, and toward softer targets—schools, restaurants, places of worship, and nodes of public transportation—where innocent civilians gather and which are not always well secured. Specific targets vary, but they tend to be symbolic and often selected because they will produce mass casualties, economic ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States

... under the moon, looked empty and deserted, and the hotel beneath him gave up no sound to tell of the many birds of passage who sheltered within it. A stunning sense of his loneliness came to him; his physical loneliness was symbolic of that which characterised his place in the world. He, alone, had the knowledge and the power to crush Antony Ferrara. He, alone, could rid the world of the unnatural menace embodied in ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... as well, recognises itself also as part of this reality. It expresses the essence of that mysterious reality in terms of its own essence. Its own essence as free spirit is the highest aspect of reality of which it is aware. It may be unconscious of the symbolic nature of its language in describing that which is higher than anything which we know, by the highest which we do know. Yet, granting that, and supposing that it is not a contradiction to attempt a description ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... besides all these resources of art, we find dancing introduced; but dancing of a solemn, mystical, and symbolic character. Here, at last, we have reached the Greek tragedy. Probably the best exemplification of a Grecian tragedy that ever will be given to a modern reader is found in the Samson Agonistes of Milton. Now, in the choral ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the charms of imagination! A few leagues from Encaramada, a rock, called Tepu-mereme, or the painted rock, rises in the midst of the savannah. Upon it are traced representations of animals, and symbolic figures resembling those we saw in going down the Orinoco, at a small distance below Encaramada, near the town Caycara. Similar rocks in Africa are called by travellers fetish stones. I shall not make ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... to forget one's past work, to scrap the models, and to start feverishly afresh. The only method left untried was the symbolic. That is to say, to hint at the eighteenth century and to suggest that through the doors on the stage existed the London of 1728. The scene demanded to be simple and one which, with slight modifications in doors ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay

... face that belonged to his prospective brother-in-law; and their countenances contrasted as vividly as the portraiture of bland phlegmatic Norse Aesir, with some bronze image of Mercury, as keenly alert as his sacred symbolic cocks. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... going to be Patriarchal," said Vernon. "What a symbolic dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There's the tragedy of romance, in a nut-shell. Yes, life's a beastly rotten show, and the light won't last ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... the scene afterwards for Rankin in the lurid and symbolic colours of his Celtic fancy. "Talk of Samson among the Philistines, it's nothing to Ricky-ticky in that d——d boarding-house. There was a woman on each side of his bed. They'd got him down on it; they were pinning the poor little chap in his blankets. I could just see Ricky-ticky's ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... as much as possible, and, therefore, I have been obliged to omit much valuable material previously gathered. For this reason many lines of prophetic truth penned by others of the sacred writers have been passed over in silence, even though relating to the same events as certain symbolic visions in the Revelation. ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... given complete data on a certain field of knowledge. Suppose further that this field is internally completely logical, completely coherent, completely self-consistent. Suppose it could even be reduced to a series of axioms and theorems in symbolic logic." ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... corrected. A list of changes is found at the end of the book. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been maintained. A list of those words is found at the end of the book. Oe ligatures have been expanded. The original book used both numerical and symbolic footnote markers. This version ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... in lieu of the mitre, and exchanging the chasuble for the pontifical cope, went to occupy his throne on the platform at the entry of the left transept. He thence dominated the whole assembly, through which a quiver sped when after the prayers of the ritual, he once more rose erect. Beneath the symbolic, triple crown, in the golden sheathing of his cope, he seemed to have grown taller. Amidst sudden and profound silence, which only feverish heart-beats interrupted, he raised his arm with a very noble gesture and pronounced the papal benediction in a slow, loud, full voice, which ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... and of the levirate, surviving as late as the epic poems, were regarded as things that need to be explained away. Perhaps the most barbaric feature in Vedic society, the most singular relic of a distant past, is the survival, even in a modified and symbolic form, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... to the fact that the pairs of numerals representing the intermediate days are usually placed in separate compartments, each containing a figure or a picture generally symbolic or of a priest dressed to indicate some particular god. It is therefore very probable that these intermediate days are to be devoted to ceremonies relating to the divinities or subjects ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas

... O-fuda are pasted above house-entrances, on the walls of rooms, upon tablets placed in household shrines, etc., etc. Some kinds are worn about the person;—others are made into pellets, and swallowed as spiritual medicine. The text of the larger o- fuda is often accompanied by curious pictures or symbolic illustrations. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... planets table. It was round, with a small, rectangular projection for the operator's controls and calculator. In the nine differently colored circular tracks, rolled little globes representing the planets. These orbits were connected by spirals of corresponding colors, symbolic of ship orbits swooping inward ...
— Fee of the Frontier • Horace Brown Fyfe

... herself to the invalid within by pointing to her breast, and making divers motions of the like signification, which were not easy to be understood, even by the party for whom they were intended. The prophetess seemed fully to comprehend that her symbolic representations were unintelligible, and no fitting place being at hand whereon they could be readily portrayed, she strove with the greater vehemence to explain her meaning. There appeared a more than ordinary ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... camped at a place called Valley Forge which has since become symbolic of hardship and suffering. It is said that detachments of American soldiers could be traced by the blood in the snow from their wounded and bare feet, for there were no shoes to clothe them with and there was very little food or fuel. And in addition to the physical hardship ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards

... everything was over, did that foolish doughboy in the hospital hug this lone thing to his memory? It was the act of an unthinking few. Didn't he notice what the rest of London was doing that day? Didn't he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky? Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? She's a person who hides her ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... from this respectful confinement, he offered the invisible lady a gracious arm and walked up and down the room with a stateliness tempered to rhythm, a cakewalk of strange refinement. Phrases seemed to be running in his head, impromptus symbolic of the touching and romantic, for he spoke them half aloud hi a wistful yet uplifted manner. "Oh, years!" he said. "Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!" Then he added, in a ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... of glorious beings who are playing upon their harps, and these are described as the 'harps of God'. The harp here is used as a sign or symbol of some great truth, or feature of the divine program; in fact, a great deal of the Bible is written in symbolic phrase. The Lord uses objects which we know to illustrate great unseen things which we do not know; and ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford

... "Count" book, in which were kept records of their work and play. The leaves were of brown paper and laced together with a leather thong or cord. The cover was of leather also. Symbolic charts for recording the requirements of the Fire Maker and Torch Bearer, as well as for nearly two hundred Elective Honors, were parts of the book. The book contained ninety-six pages. It was arranged for a group of twelve girls. Should the group grow larger, ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... obtained, is symbolic of many of the apparently refined enjoyments of our life. We shall find that luxury and pomp, delightful sometimes in themselves, are distilled through a layer of coarse and repulsive labour by other folk; and the thought of the pork suet ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... the conventional pose—that pose of arm and thigh which the Greeks never wearied of. Seeing him, the mind turned from the reserve of the Christian world towards the frank enjoyment of the Pagan; and John's solid, rhythmless form was as symbolic of dogma as Mike's of the grace ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... pinch of snuff. Rasped tobacco, tabac rape, called by mortals rape or rappee: there is no doubt about it; and the new King himself noticed her, and hurled back a look of due fulminancy, which could not help the matter, and was only lost in air. A memorable little action, and almost symbolic in the first Prussian Coronation. "Yes, we are Kings, and are got SO near the stars, not nearer; and you invoke the gods, in that tremendously long-winded manner; and I—Heavens, I have my snuff-box by me, at least!" Thou wearied patient Heroine; cognizant of the infinitely little!—This symbolic ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... beside him, felt a thrill in his nerves, a prickling in his cheeks, at that mysterious cry, which seemed to him to have something almost of menace in its lure. Even so, he thought, might Pan have summoned his followers, shaggy and dangerous, yet half divine, to some symbolic revel. ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Queen Hatasu's throne, made of wood foreign to Egypt, the legs most elegantly carved in imitation of the legs of an animal, covered with gold down to the hoof, finishing with a silver band. Each leg has carved in relief two Uroei, the sacred cobra serpent of Egypt, symbolic of a goddess. These are plated with gold. Each arm is ornamented with a serpent curving gracefully along from head to tail, the scales admirably imitated by hundreds of inlaid silver rings. The only remaining rail is plated with silver. The gold and silver are of ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird

... cruel death of their captive father, Ragnar's sons act the blood-eagle on Ella, and salt his flesh. There is an undoubted instance of this act of vengeance (the symbolic meaning of which is not clear as yet) ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... is interested enough to trace the genealogy of Victoria he finds, to his surprise, that in her veins flowed the blood both of William the Conqueror and of Cerdic, the first Saxon king of England; and this seems to be symbolic of the literature of her age, which embraces the whole realm of Saxon and Norman life,—the strength and ideals of the one, and the culture and refinement of the other. The romantic revival had done its work, and England entered ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... said that "the cap'n put it in his musket when he went into the war, and kep' it there till he come out." These objects were tastefully decorated with the national colors. In fact, no modern aesthete could have arranged a symbolic symphony of grief and glory with any more fidelity to an ideal than Diadema Bascom, in working out her scheme ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... which he has a very dim notion. And then a boy, whom John knows, rides by in a wagon with his father, and the boy makes a face at John, and John returns the greeting with a twist of his own visage and some symbolic gestures. All these things take time. The work of cutting down the big weeds gets on slowly, although it is not very disagreeable, or would not be if it were play. John imagines that yonder big thistle is some whiskered villain, of whom he has read in a fairy book, and he advances on him ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... rigid economy may be a good man, but his children can know little of his real motives and must be wrongly influenced by his conduct." We all agreed that there was nowadays too much talk about money-making in rural Japan. "Even I," laughed the owner of the symbolic trees, "planted not persimmons ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... Camp Fire Girls of America, I place on the little finger of your left hand this ring, with its design of seven fagots, symbolic of the seven points of the law of the Fire, which you have expressed your desire to follow, and of the three circles on either side, symbolic of the three watchwords of this organization—Work, Health, ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart

... second advent was that of Dan. 8:14: "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." Following his rule of making Scripture its own interpreter, Miller learned that a day in symbolic prophecy represents a year;(537) he saw that the period of 2300 prophetic days, or literal years, would extend far beyond the close of the Jewish dispensation, hence it could not refer to the sanctuary of that dispensation. Miller accepted the generally received view, that ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... was mostly a symbolic thought association, unconscious to the person concerned, which led to the replacing of the object by means of a fetich. The paths of these connections can not always be definitely demonstrated. The foot is a very ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... steeds were swift As howling north-winds, and their flowing manes Were flecked with diamonds brighter than Brazilian stones! He came! To celebrate his triumph, first He spread a fleecy mantle o'er the earth— A frozen shroud symbolic of the Death he wrought. And then to every pendent branch he hung A glittering sword,—the tyrant's right to rule,— Demanding greater ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe

... he would have found difficult to analyze led him to descend the steps and pick up the symbolic bud, now torn and withering fast, and to place it between the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... of the blank spaces of Mindanao indicated the whereabouts of a fearless ethnologist from the Field Museum: a red sticker bore the name of an engineer who had been out of touch for six weeks, running the line of a new trail across the great bulk of Mindanao. The map was symbolic of the Constabulary, whose duty it is to know all, to ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L": that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the wood-shed and cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton

... the crux ansata of the Egyptians, the oval standing upon the upright, or letter Tau, may be shown to be a sex symbol, the union of the oval with the upright being of symbolic significance. The crux ansata is found in the hand of most of the Egyptian deities. It is found in the Assyrian temples and throughout the temples of India as well. Prehistoric monuments of Ireland have the same design. Priests ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II

... those prophecies which concern the church, let us pause and consider briefly the character of symbols. The prophecy of the Scriptures is presented to us in two distinct forms—direct statements in the ordinary language of life and in symbolic representations, but far the greater part is expressed in symbols, as in the book of Daniel and in the Revelation of John. Without an understanding of the nature of symbols we can not get a proper understanding of ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith

... St. Margaret's Convent was a chill, bare chamber containing an oak table and four or five plain oak chairs. On the painted walls, which were of dun gray, there was an etching by a Florentine master of the flight into Egypt, and a symbolic print of the Sacred Heart. Besides these pictures there was but a single text to relieve the blindness of the empty walls, and it ran: "Where the tree ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... garret. Against all reasoning, she continued to feel something antipathetic in Henry's clothes and even in his occupation—perhaps it was really the subconscious antagonism of the old clo' and the new, subtly symbolic of the old generation and the smart new world springing up to tread it down. Henry himself was secretly pleased at her refusal. In the first ardours of courtship he had consented to swallow even the Polish crone who had strangely mothered his buxom British ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... carrying so far in the tranquil summer air. The breeze was south-by-southwest; the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology. Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside them ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry

... man looked hard at her, and then opening his hand, let the pieces of torn paper flutter down into the basket. It was done with a singularly measured action, symbolic of casting off some last tie, severing some last link, which bound his life and his allegiance to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... are often used in Logic instead of concrete terms, not only in Symbolic Logic where the science is treated algebraically (as by Dr. Venn in his Symbolic Logic), but in ordinary manuals; so that it may be well to explain the use of them before ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... long low shed hastily put together, and fashioned so that it could be taken down and moved farther along to the new front every few days. Through the opening he glimpsed figures in white, bearing the symbolic Red Cross on headpiece and left arm, moving about among the white cots, ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach

... Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling of a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees," says ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... a direct connection between dreams and insanity, between the symbolic visions of our sleep and the symbolic actions of ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... with the elegant tranquillity of one assured of celestial aid, down to him "who swings on a sign-post at mine hostess's door"—he is our familiar acquaintance. But who is that lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished dragon? "That is a copy after Raphael." And who is that majestic creature holding her palm-branch, while the unicorn crouches at her feet? "That is the famous Moretto at Vienna." ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... posed as initiates of the occult sciences, as possessors of the grand secret and the grand mastery; there, finally, under the influences of transcendental philosophy, emblematic Freemasonry took root and grew and flourished, developing ten thousand splendours of symbolic grades, of romantic legends, of sonorous names and titles. In a word, the Mysticism of Europe concentrated its forces at Paris and Lyons, and all French Mysticism gathered under the shadow of the square and compass. To that, as to a centre, the whole movement gravitated, and thence it worked. ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a not uncommon occurrence in her childhood—a school picnic in the Black Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of her mother. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... in interminable reveries, sitting with a volume before him, as often as not unopened, smoking incessantly, and looking out of the window. The habit amused himself at times; it was so eminently symbolic of his destiny. Life, after all, had been to him nothing so much as that—a long looking out of window, the impartial spectatorship of a crowd of persons and passions from which he had come at last to seem strangely detached, almost as much as from this chameleon river, which ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... is just as good as their game, and saner by reason of its size. Here is War, done down to rational proportions, and yet out of the way of mankind, even as our fathers turned human sacrifices into the eating of little images and symbolic mouthfuls. For my own part, I am prepared. I have nearly five hundred men, more than a score of guns, and I twirl my moustache and hurl defiance eastward from my home in Essex across the narrow seas. Not only eastward. I would conclude this ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells

... uncivilized races, which are impressed more through their eyes than their understanding. If the grandeur of the ritual, the magnificence of the processions, the lustre of the church vessels and the images themselves have never been understood by the masses in the strictly symbolic sense in which they appeal to us, at least they have had their influence in drawing millions to civilization and to a unique uniformity of precept, the practice of which it is beyond all human ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman



Words linked to "Symbolic" :   symbol, emblematic, symbolic logician, emblematical, symbolic representation, symbolical, symbolism, symbolic logic, representative



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