Life & Wisdom Quote by Margot Asquith

“Symbols” sound decorative until Asquith reframes them as infrastructure: not ornaments on experience, but the roadside markers that let you travel through it without getting lost. Calling them “imaginative signposts” is a sly elevation of interpretation itself. A signpost is practical, external, meant to be read quickly; “imaginative” implies something inward, provisional, and culturally coded. Put together, the phrase argues that humans don’t just live - we navigate, and we do it by reading meanings into objects, rituals, and stories.

The intent is quietly corrective. In a period when modernity was accelerating - new media, mass politics, the rupture of World War I - Asquith’s line defends the symbolic layer of life against the era’s growing worship of the literal and the measurable. Signposts don’t replace the road; they make the road usable. That’s the subtext: symbolism isn’t escapism, it’s orientation. Religion, art, flags, wedding rings, uniforms, even social manners become tools for sense-making, especially when reality is too large, chaotic, or painful to process raw.

Context matters here because Asquith wasn’t speaking from an ivory tower; she moved in the heart of British political society as H.H. Asquith’s wife, watching public life run on theater, emblem, and coded performance. In that world, symbols weren’t abstractions - they were power’s user interface. The line flatters imagination, but it also warns: whoever controls the signposts influences where people think they’re going.