Lighthouse Symbolism Quotes

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

Skip had loved that lighthouse—and all it symbolized. Light in the darkness. Guidance through turbulent waters. Salvation for the floundering. Hope for lost souls.

...the lighthouse, as a symbol, made no sense. Someone had declared it a Christian beacon of some sort, but a lighthouse wasn't something that led you to a safe harbor, a lighthouse was something that you avoided at all costs, a lighthouse was something you stayed away from lest you and your ship be dashed on the rocks. The most perverse message a lighthouse could ever deliver is come here and be saved.

Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her way, high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts. —Louis Aragon

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him -- without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel it on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did--(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, a bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track down and stamp out -- tyranny, despotism, he called it -- making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak.

Suddenly Mr. Ramsay raised his head as he passed and looked straight at her, with his distraught wild gaze which was yet so penetrating, as if he saw you, for one second, for the first time, for ever; and she pretended to drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape him--to escape his demand on her, to put aside a moment longer that imperious need. And he shook his head at her, and strode on ("Alone" she heard him say, "Perished" she heard him say) and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover’s egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid calm, he turned a page. And James felt that each page was turned with a peculiar gesture aimed at him: now assertively, now commandingly; now with the intention of making people pity him; and all the time, as his father read and turned one after another of those little pages, James kept dreading the moment when he would look up and speak sharply to him about something or other. Why were they lagging about here? he would demand, or something quite unreasonable like that. And if he does, James thought, then I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart. He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him—without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did—(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track down and stamp out—tyranny, despotism, he called it—making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak. How could any of them say, But I won’t, when he said, Come to the Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black wings spread, and the hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat reading his book; and he might look up—one never knew—quite reasonably. He might talk to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign into some frozen old woman’s hand in the street, James thought; he might be shouting out at some fisherman’s sports; he might be waving his arms in the air with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of the table dead silent from one end of dinner to the other.

The 7 Timeless Virtues of Enlightened Living Virtue     Symbol       1 Master Your Mind       The Magnificent Garden       2 Follow Your Purpose       The Towering Lighthouse       3 Practice Kaizen       The Sumo Wrestler       4 Live with Discipline       The Pink Wire Cable       5 Respect Your Time       The Gold Stopwatch       6 Selflessly Serve Others       The Fragrant Roses       7 Embrace the Present       The Path of Diamonds

I believe North Carolina is going to be a very important place in holding positive energy for this part of the world as we go through our next evolution on a body, mind, spirit, and planetary level. I believe that North Carolina is evolving into a light center for the United States. I see the symbolism with the lighthouses all along the North Carolina coast, shining brightly. They remind me of the great lighthouse in Alexandria, Egypt, where the world’s greatest library once existed. On the other end of the state lie the mystical Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and with vortices in the area spinning with so much energy in cities like Asheville that the area has been nicknamed the Sedona of the South, in reference to the vortices and spiritual energy

He arrived every three months with daughter and copy-editor, stayed for two weeks, created a disturbance and succeeded in reminding us that we permanent residents are a coterie of irrelevant escapees from reality; that, like the old lighthouse, we are merely symbols, relics of the past. He punctured our complacency. To that extent he served his purpose. You could call him a necessary evil.

Being a dream, the lighthouse keeper was nameless. You see, dream-folk are not ordinary people, bound by the cycle of birth and death. They are the symbols and manifestations of the collective unconscious. They are the wise old man before he was Gandalf the Grey. They are The Hero with a Thousand Faces. They are every villain that same hero overcame. They are the everlasting ideas we transform into all those mythologies which give sense to the world.

During the taxi ride on the way to the hotel, I had to laugh to myself as I experienced another special moment between the Universe and I. I have been referring to this trip as a journey into my heart, and have been envisioning Tulum as a physical symbol of heaven on earth. So what do you think is the first song that plays once the taxi driver turns on his tape cassette? As I hear the lyrics fill up the van, I almost can’t believe the synchronicity myself. It is the most perfect, fitting song in the world to be playing at this moment in time: “When you walk into the room You pull me close and we start to move, And we’re spinning with the stars above, And you lift me up in a wave of love… (Wait for it…) Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh heaven is a place on earth They say in heaven, love comes first We’ll make heaven a place on earth Ooh heaven is a place on earth.

The garden keeps me focused on inspiring thoughts, the lighthouse reminds me that the purpose of life is a life of purpose, the sumo wrestler keeps me centered on continuous self-discovery, while the pink wire cable links me to the wonders of willpower. A day doesn’t pass without me thinking about the fable and considering the principles Yogi Raman taught me.” “And exactly what does the shiny gold stopwatch represent?’ “It is a symbol of our most important commodity — time.

Black Beacon Books... Why the name? There are many tropes and symbols used in fiction of a dark and mysterious nature. Amongst them, we have keys, mirrors, telescopes, treasure chests, secret passages, graveyards, skulls, churches, castles, caves, telescopes, clocks, the moon, oil lamps and candles, and, of course, beacons and lighthouses. The beacon or lighthouse conjures a setting of darkness, for in daylight they are rendered almost useless. In this darkness, they have a role to play, a crucial role, and that is to either warn away or beckon nearer. That is also the role of Black Beacon Books, to thrust the reader into mystery and darkness whilst providing a distant and guiding light, one that can be seen atop cliffs rising up from a troubled sea or on the peaks of wild mountains. We want stories that both warn you of impending danger and draw you into the worlds they create.

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed.