"Symbols are the universal tongue. … Symbols bring color and strength to language, while deepening and enriching our understandings. Symbols enable us to give conceptual form to ideas and emotions that may otherwise defy the power of words. They take us beyond words and grant us eloquence in the expression of feelings. Symbolic language conceals certain doctrinal truths from the wicked and thereby protects sacred things from possible ridicule. At the same time, symbols reveal truth to the spiritually alert."
“… Symbols are the language in which all gospel covenants and all ordinances of salvation have been revealed. From the time we are immersed in the waters of baptism to the time we kneel at the altar of the temple with the companion of our choice in the ordinance of eternal marriage, every covenant we make will be written in the language of symbolism.”
Joseph Fielding McConkie and Donald W. Parry, Guide to Scriptural Symbols (1990),
"Symbolic language is a language in which inner experience, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences or events in the outer world. Symbolic language is different from the language ordinarily spoken in daily life. It has a different logic. Time and space, for example, are not the ruling categories that they are in outer life. Rather the ruling categories are intensity and association....
"Symbolic language is not only the language of dreams, but it is also the language of myths and fairy tales. It is the most basic way in which people are able to grasp an idea....
"Even when the symbol used denotes a physical, limited thing, it carries enlarging connotations. The meaning is usually somewhat ambiguous, but still it carries emotional power and suggests multiple meanings. It intimates a larger reality....
"....genuine symbols cannot be precisely 'interpreted' by any one single meaning. Jung says they are always 'ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible'....Jung pointed to the danger of reducing a symbol to some specified rational interpretation."
Clift, Wallace and Jean
Symbols of Transformation in Dreams
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