“All religious thought and speech are through and through symbolic. And this fundamental insight is perhaps as old as religion itself.”
p. VI.
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Walter Terence Stace 36
British civil servant, educator and philosopher. 1886–1967Related quotes

No. 142: letter to his friend Robert Murray, S.J. (December 1953)
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

1870s, Speech to the Society of the Army of Tennessee (1875)

“All religious expression is symbolism”
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 62
Context: All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word " spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe.

Source: As quoted in "Poet Laureate: Louise Glück and the Public Face of a Private Artist" https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/editorial-observer-poet-laureate-louise-gluck-public-face-private-artist.html by Andrew Johnston, The New York Times (November 4, 2003)
Source: Tsai Ping-kun (2019) cited in " Muslims gather at Taipei Railway Station for Eid al-Fitr http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2019/06/06/2003716437" on Taipei Times, 6 June 2019.

Donald N. Levine (1988), The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. p. 218; Partly cited in: David L. Sills, Robert King Merton (2000), Social Science Quotations: Who Said What, When, and Where. p. 129-130

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom. It's that same exact principle: it's great having one of these guys, but we sure wouldn't want to have three of them in our tribe. Overdo it, and our schizotypalism in the Western religious setting is what we call a "cult," and there you are in the realm of a Charles Manson or a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. You can only do post-hoc forensic psychiatry on Koresh and Jones, but Charles Manson is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. But get it just right, and people are gonna get the day off from work on your birthday for millennia to come. [laughter] This is great! I think this is the first time I've ever said that line without somebody getting up and leaving in a huff from the audience. It's very nice being here.