Quotes
Christianity has long spoken through parable, poetry, image, allegory, and symbol. The following voices helped shape the literary-symbolic understanding beneath AwakenArts.
From Scripture and poetic theology to literary imagination and figurative narrative, these passages reflect a longstanding tradition in which language carries meaning through image, symbol, and poetic form.
Scripture & Parable
Scripture itself speaks extensively through poetry, parable, metaphor, image, symbolic vision, and figurative language. From the Psalms and Proverbs to the prophetic books and the parables of Christ, the Bible repeatedly communicates truth through image-bearing forms that invite recognition as much as explanation.
The language of Scripture is not merely informational. It is poetic, narrative, symbolic, and embodied. Christ Himself taught predominantly through parable, allowing meaning to unfold through story, image, and reflection rather than abstraction alone.
This symbolic and poetic dimension of Biblical language forms an essential foundation beneath the AwakenArts framework.
“He did not say anything to them without using a parable.”
Matthew 13:34“I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter hidden things, things from of old.”
Psalm 78:2“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Psalm 19:1“Deep calls to deep.”
Psalm 42:7“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.”
Psalm 119:105“For now we see through a glass, darkly.”
1 Corinthians 13:12“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Matthew 13:9“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Proverbs 29:18Literary Voices
“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
C. S. Lewis“We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see.”
C. S. Lewis“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
C. S. LewisThis hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend.
John Bunyan“Then I saw in my dream…”
John Bunyan“Christianity is not in talk and profession, but in practice and reality.”
John Bunyan“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer the art, the more things it will mean.”
George MacDonald“It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning.”
George MacDonald“To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination.”
George MacDonald“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
G. K. Chesterton“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.”
G. K. Chesterton“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
G. K. Chesterton“The dogma is the drama.”
Dorothy L. Sayers“We may call Art the expression of man’s delight in God’s work.”
Dorothy L. Sayers“The imagination is not a separate faculty of the mind, but the mind working at full strength.”
Dorothy L. Sayers“Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made.”
J. R. R. Tolkien“We make still by the law in which we’re made.”
J. R. R. Tolkien“Not all those who wander are lost.”
J. R. R. Tolkien“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
T. S. Eliot“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
T. S. Eliot“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
T. S. EliotDifferent centuries, forms, and voices — yet each reaching for the same thing Scripture reached for first: truth carried in image, story, and symbol, met rather than merely explained. AwakenArts continues that practice, not as commentary on the tradition, but as part of it.