“Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.”

— John Greenleaf Whittier

To Charles Sumner, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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John Greenleaf Whittier 47

American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slave… 1807–1892

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“Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear.”
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Context: I shall grasp the soul's skirt with my hand
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“A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance. A cross could equally stand for crossing something out. It could also be a sign of obstruction. An overturned cross, an X so to speak, could be the symbol of mystery, something for the other side. Then I could paint a cross in such a way that a connection is made between two bars, and in doing so convert it into a symbol of the unlimited. So, many different crosses and X symbols occur in my works.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

quote from 1988
1981 - 1990
Source: Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003, Achim Sommer, Kunsthalle Emden, Altana 2004, p. 27

“Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.”

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John Greenleaf Whittier 47

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