Allegory Quotes

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels. ~ Jan Morris

Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart. ~ Sylvia Plath

N equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite ... ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. ~ Haruki Murakami

Masonry, according to the general acceptation of the term, is an art founded on the principles of geometry, and devoted to the service and convenience of mankind. But Freemasonry, embracing a wider range and having a nobler object in view, namely, the cultivation and improvement of the human mind, may with more propriety be called a science, inasmuch as, availing itself of the terms of the former, it inculcates the principles of the purest morality, though its lessons are for the most part veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. ~ William Howard Taft

The Death of Allegory

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.


Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,


Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.


Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.


Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.


Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,


themselves and nothing ~ Billy Collins

In ancient Jewish tradition, as far back as we can tell, the Song of Songs was not interpreted as a love poem or as an allegory of the individual soul; it was interpreted as an allegory of God's spousal love for the people of Israel. ~ Brant Pitre

He saw in Mr Chivery, with some astonishment, quite an Allegory of Silence, ~ Charles Dickens

Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows; in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come by in any other way. ~ C.S. Lewis

I use my understanding of jiu jitsu as a road map to learn other activities. I look for the similarities between the two, and use jiu jitsu as an allegory for whatever my new practice may be. I truly believe once you have learned one thing, you have learned all things because you have learned how to learn. ~ Chris Matakas

The Patriots deflated balls are but an allegory for America's deflated balls in dealings with Putin, the Mullahs in Iran, and Islamic terrorists. ~ Dennis Miller

106. A GREAT CITADEL The most likely allegory is that the Citadel represents philosophy (that is, human reason without the light of God) surrounded by seven walls which represent the seven liberal arts, ~ Dante Alighieri

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams. ~ Manuel Puig

In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party ~ Donna Tartt

...[A] poor priest, Chandi Das, was shocking Bengal by composing Dantean songs to a peasant Beatrice, ideal­izing her with romantic passion, exalting her as a symbol of divinity, and making his love an allegory of his desire for absorption in God; at the same time he inaugurated the use of Bengali as a literary language. "I have taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. When I do not see you my mind has no rest .... I cannot forget your grace and your charm, - and yet there is no desire in my heart." Excommunicated by his fellow Brahmans on the ground that he was scandalizing the public, he agreed to renounce his love, Rami, in a public ceremony of recantation; but when, in the course of this ritual, he saw Rami in the crowd, he withdrew his recanta­tion, and going up to her, bowed before her with hands joined in adora-
tion. ~ Will Durant

I don't like the new trends in horror. All this torture stuff seems really mean-spirited. People have forgotten how to laugh, and I don't see anybody who's using it as allegory. ~ George A. Romero

Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising 'Take two aspirins'? ~ Warren Buffett

I wouldn't commit murder for the sake of an allegory. ~ Vita Sackville-West

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. ~ C.S. Lewis

Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I don't like allegory. ~ China Mieville

There are no obstacles which our Savior's love cannot overcome. The High Places of victory and union with Christ can be reached by learning to accept, day by day, the actual conditions and tests permitted by God, by laying down of our own will and accepting His. The lessons of accepting and triumphing over evil, of becoming acquainted with grief, and pain, and of finding them transformed into something incomparably precious; these are the lessons of the allegory in this book. ~ Hannah Hurnard

On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.

The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest - hence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.

However, some of the lamps are "turned down" and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will) - hence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.

The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.

As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to "feel" a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).

The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.

The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.

The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe - and this includes ~ Vera Nazarian

That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C.S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up. ~ Seanan McGuire

Und nicht wahr, wenn man ihn zwänge, in das Licht selbst zu sehen, so würde er Schmerzen an den Augen haben, davonlaufen und sich wieder jenen Schattengegenständen zuwenden, die er ansehen kann, und würde dabei bleiben, diese wären wirklich deutlicher als die, welche er gezeigt bekam?

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him? ~ Plato

When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience - an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me. ~ Hermann Hesse

Each has its lesson; for our dreams in sooth, come they in shape of demons, gods, or elves, are allegories with deep hearts of truth that tell us solemn secrets of ourselves. ~ Henry Timrod

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. ~ C.S. Lewis

A novel is not an allegory ... it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed. ~ Azar Nafisi

A novel is not an allegory ... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. ~ Azar Nafisi

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life, a life like the scriptures, figurative. ~ John Keats

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man - motivated by self-interest - is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a strong controlling state, 'an artificial man', to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics. ~ Ronald Carter

We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Allegories drawn to great length will always break. ~ Samuel Johnson

There came a day when the Masons, laying aside their stones, became workmen of another kind, not less builders than before, but using truths for tools and dramas for designs, uplifting such a temple as Watts dreamed of decorating with his visions of the august allegory of the evolution of man. ~ Joseph Fort Newton

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life. ~ N. T. Wright

Freemasonry is 'veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols' because these are the surest way by which moral and ethical truths may be taught. It is not only with the brain and with the mind that the initiate must take Freemasonry but also with the heart. ~ Carl H. Claudy

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories. ~ Stanley Kubrick

The fruth is the truth revealed by stipulating what the meaning of 'is' is. ~ Hari Manev

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Were I to throw my thoughts on this subject," said my good father-in-law, as he began to enter more warmly into the debates, drawing his chair opposite Worthy, and raising his hand with a poetical enthusiasm - "Were I to throw my thoughts on this subject into an Allegory, I would describe the human mind as an extensive plain, and knowledge as the river that should water it. If the course of the river be properly directed, the plain will be fertilized and cultivated to advantage; but if books, which are the sources that feed this river, rush into it from every quarter, it will overflow its banks, and the plain will become inundated: When, therefore, knowledge flows on in its proper channel, this extensive and valuable field, the mind, instead of being covered with stagnant waters, is cultivated to the utmost advantage, and blooms luxuriantly into a general efflorescence - for a river properly restricted by high banks, is necessarily progressive. ~ William Hill Brown

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory
a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth. ~ Luigi Pirandello

I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories. ~ Philip Kitcher

I love to read, but all through school I hated it when books were pulled apart and analyzed. Winnie-the-pooh as a political allegory, that sort of thing. It never really worked for me. There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her that when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment."

'The Winter Sea ~ Susanna Kearsley

On the walls of the cave, only the shadows are the truth ~ Plato, The Allegory Of The Cave

Comparisons are like rigid fingers - eager to point at a subject but unwilling to grasp it. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Confession is a sacred rite enhanced by allegory, exaggeration, and lies. ~ Craig Ferguson

No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire. ~ George MacDonald

There has to be the popcorn genre element, or I don't engage the same way. I like action and vehicle design and guns and computer graphics as much as I like allegory. It's a constant balancing game. I want audiences to be on this rollercoaster that fits the Hollywood mould, but I also want them to absorb my observations. ~ Neill Blomkamp

A Mixed-breed Apple
A little mixed-breed apple,
half red, half yellow, tells this story.
A lover and beloved get separated.
Their being apart was one thing,
but they have opposite responses.
The lover feels pain and grows pale.
The beloved flushes and feels proud.
I am a thorn next to my master's rose.
We seem to be two, but we are not. ~ Rumi

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. ~ Walter Benjamin

A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do. ~ Philip Pullman

There were many stories of girls - brave girls, foolish girls, reckless girls, pretty girls - who went into the woods searching for fortune or adventure, only to encounter a monster. Whether man or beast, the monster served as an allegory for all the things that could befall a girl who strayed from the path. If she were valorous and her heart was pure, the stories said, she could rise above being brought low by hubris.

But the stories never talked about the other girls - the ones who never came out of the woods and found themselves an unwilling bride to the venal darkness within those trees. The girls whose virtue was not quite enough to resist the seasoned allure of the wicked villain and who, as a result, found that men, like beasts, could devour the unwary, and that it could feel so good to be consumed. ~ Nenia Campbell

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music. ~ Amos Oz

I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag. ~ Margaret Atwood

Nowhere in Chaucer do we find what can be called a radically allegorical poem. ~ C.S. Lewis

The artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost degree of the former! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here ... ~ Richard Flanagan

Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Twelve dead?" I said. "Jesus. ~ Dennis Lehane

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The Allegory of the Wolf Boy" ("At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity"). ~ Oliver Sacks

The columns of the Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts, the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously ~ Edith Wharton

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms. ~ Manuel Puig

The reason for you complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination. Here I will make an observation, and illustrate it by an allegory. Apparently, it is not good-and indeed it hinders the creative work of the mind-if the if the intellect examines too closely the ideas pouring in, as it were, at the gates. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks ~ Umberto Eco

Once one is beyond a certain level of commitment to the sport, life begins to seem an allegory of rowing rather than rowing an allegory of life. ~ Stefan Kieszling

However, I have also argued for allegory's positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed. ~ Helen Morales

The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. ~ Mark Twain

If you look only as Genesis as an allegory, you have a major problem, because if it's an allegory, then tell me who our ancestor was? If Abraham was real, then from Abraham if Adam isn't real, if it's just an allegory, it's just a story, then what's the real Adam who really fell in a garden and really sinned? Where did we come from? ~ Ken Ham

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness, a story. - Tolstoy ~ Haruki Murakami

What does Éloa mean?"

He narrowed his gaze, answered her literally. "It's the name of an angel."

Penelope tilted her head, thinking. "I've never heard of him."

"You wouldn't have."

"Was he a fallen angel?"

"She was, yes." He hesitated, not wanting to tell her the story, but unable to stop himself. "Lucifer tricked her into falling from heaven."

"Tricked her how?"

He met her gaze. "She fell in love with him."

Penelope's eyes widened. "Did he love her?"

Like an addict loves his addiction. "The only way he knew how."

She shook her head. "How could he trick her?"

"He never told her his name. ~ Sarah MacLean

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. ~ Herman Melville

The 'Bourne' movies are great in their own ways; it introduces a whole other sort of allegory about the Bush years. The secrecy and the threats of a big global organization. ~ Chris Terrio

A Witch's work is mind work and utilizes powerful metaphors, allegories, and images that unlock the powers of the mind. ~ Laurie Cabot

The philosophers stone is just an allegory. It represents everything that man wants and can never have. ~ Katherine Howe

But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims." A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry. ~ Matthew Arnold

When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us? ... ~ John Geddes

The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. It can also absorb changing interests, rival apocalypses, such as the Sibylline writings. It is patient of change and of historiographical sophistications. It allows itself to be diffused, blended with other varieties of fiction--tragedy, for example, myths of Empire and of Decadence--and yet it can survive in very naïve forms. Probably the most sophisticated of us is capable at times of naïve reactions to the End. ~ Frank Kermode

My mother always said that I would come to a bad end but I never thought she meant this - writing allegory in literal times. ~ Peter Murphy

The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

'Ever seen a leaf - a leaf from a tree?' 'Yes.' I saw one recently - a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining ... ' 'What's this - an allegory?' No; why? Not an allegory - a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything's good.' ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory. ~ John Kessel

Peter tells Langdon that the Masons believe that the Bible is an esoteric allegory written by humanity, and that, like most religious texts around the globe, it contains veiled instructions for harnessing humanity's natural God-like qualities and is not meant to be interpreted as the commands of an all-powerful deity. This interpretation has been lost amid centuries of scientific skepticism and fundamentalist zealotry. The Masons have (metaphorically) buried it, believing that, when the time is right, its rediscovery will usher in a new era of human enlightenment. ~ The Lost Symbol Wikipedia

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill - the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. ~ William Butler Yeats

Are we all not, when we sit in the cinema, in the position of humans in The Matrix, tied to chairs, immersed in the spectacle run by a machine? However, a more appropriate allegory is that of the viewer himself: beneath the illusion that we "just look" at the perceived objects from a safe distance, freely sliding along them, there is the reality of the innumerable ties that bind us to what we perceive. ~ Slavoj Zizek

I've always felt that the reality of life is best expressed through allegory that transcends ... well, the reality of life. Fantasy is the lens through which I make sense of the world. Plus, it's a lot more entertaining. ~ Brea Nicole Bond

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. ~ Edmund White

It's just the problem with those things, and what i've learnt is this: they're meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate ... thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It's meant to be: here's your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don't work that way, bro. You don't get the full benefit. You've got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can't just fly up to the branches. You get me? ~ Zadie Smith

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. ~ Francisco Jimenez

It's terrible to have to fear that your powers will activate at any given moment. Especially when you draw close to people ... and find that your only choice is to pull away. It's overwhelming when you find a time, a person, with which there's nothing to fear. ~ Zechariah Barrett

What makes Jessica Jones series so unique is that it really is an allegory for many different types of abuse, whether it be sexual abuse, physical abuse, or psychological abuse. That's what makes this such an incredibly bold show. ~ Rachael Taylor

Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it. ~ Jeffrey Tayler