Source: The Great God Pan (1894), Ch. VII : The Encounter in Soho
Context: I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish, silly tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?
Source: Science and Sanity (1933), p. 76.
“Be good, love the Lord, pray for those who do not know Him. What a great grace it is to know God!”
Quoted in "Josephine Bakhita (1869-1947)", The Holy See https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20001001_giuseppina-bakhita_en.html.
“In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks himself of nothing knows nothing.”
“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
Trial records (15 March 1431)
Trial records (1431)
“All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.”
II.3.7
The First Ennead (c. 250)
Diary of an Unknown (1988)
