“Symbols are miracles we have recorded into language.”

“Literature is a writer's secret life recorded in symbols.”

“Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.”

“The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother?The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.”

“the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”

“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”