“Honour both spirit and form, the sentiment within as well as the symbol without.”

—  Ramakrishna

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 308

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Honour both spirit and form, the sentiment within as well as the symbol without." by Ramakrishna?
Ramakrishna photo
Ramakrishna 142
Indian mystic and religious preacher 1836–1886

Related quotes

George Peacock photo
Nikolai Berdyaev photo

“In objectification there are no primal realities, but only symbols. The objective spirit is merely a symbolism of spirit. Spirit is realistic while cultural and social life are symbolical.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

Source: Spirit and Reality (1946), p. 52
Context: Spirit, like flame, like freedom, like creativeness, is opposed to any social stagnation or any lifeless tradition. In terms of Kantian philosophy — terms which I consider erroneous and confusing — spirit appears as a thing in itself and objectification as a phenomenon. Another and truer definition would be, spirit is freedom and objectification is nature (not in the romantic sense). Objectification has two aspects: on the one hand it denotes the fallen, divided and servile world, in which the existential subjects, the personalities, are materialized. On the other it comprehends the agency of the personal subject, of spirit tending to reinforce ties and communications in this fallen world. Hence objectification is related to the problem of culture, and in this consists the whole complexity of the problem.
In objectification there are no primal realities, but only symbols. The objective spirit is merely a symbolism of spirit. Spirit is realistic while cultural and social life are symbolical. In the object there is never any reality, but only the symbol of reality. The subject alone always has reality. Therefore in objectification and in its product, the objective spirit, there can be no sacred reality, but only its symbolism. In the objective history of the world nothing transpires but a conventional symbolism; the idea of sacredness is peculiar to the existential world, to existential subjects. The real depths of spirit are apprehensible only existentially in the personal experience of destiny, in its suffering, nostalgia, love, creation, freedom and death.

George Peacock photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

On Poesy or Art (1818)

“Belief has its structures, and its symbols change. Its tradition changes. All the relationships within these forms are inter-dependent.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 96
Context: Belief has its structures, and its symbols change. Its tradition changes. All the relationships within these forms are inter-dependent. We look at the symbols, we hope to read them, we hope for sharing and communication. Sometimes it is there at once, we find it before the words arrive, as in the gesture of John Brown, or the communication of a great actor-dancer, whose gesture and attitude will tell us before his speech adds meaning from another source. Sometimes it rises in us sleeping, evoked by the images of dream, recognized in the blood. The buried voices carry a ground music; they have indeed lived the life of our people. In times of perversity and stress and sundering, it may be a life inverted, the poet who leaps from the ship into the sea; on the level of open belief, it will be the life of the tribe. In subjugated peoples, the poet emerges as prophet.

Nicole Krauss photo
George Sand photo

“The large gray spiked form rising from the bottom of the picture is to me the symbol of death and ruin. And finally the black ovoid form is the symbol of fire, lava and destruction.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

in a letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. 6 November, 1955; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 34
Baziotes' quote is referring to his painting 'Pompeii', Baziotes painted in 1955
1950s

Related topics