Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sigmund Freud
Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams. Mason Cooley
There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. Ernest Hemingway
When a symbol unmoors itself from what it symbolizes, it loses meaning. It becomes ineffective. Arundhati Roy
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. William Butler Yeats
Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature speaks in symbols and in signs. John Greenleaf Whittier