Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.

Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.

It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.