Famous quotes containing the words basic, mission and/or symbol:
“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)