Top 100 Life Metaphor Quotes
#1. Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.
Robert Redford
#2. Gardening is peaceful, yet there is a great element of failure. It's the perfect metaphor for life
a lot of pleasure, then it's over. There's great satisfaction in tending something, feeling it needs you, even if it's just a plant on your windowsill.
Jane Kaczmarek
#3. I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She was all the raw colours of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple in man's form.
Pierce Brown
#4. Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
Rene Magritte
#5. The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.
Martin Gardner
#6. Every time I write these words they become a taboo,
Making sure my punctuation curve, every letter here's true,
Living my life in the margin, and that metaphor was proof.
Kendrick Lamar
#7. The subject [of Los Angeles] became a general metaphor for anxiety and the speed of modern life.
Edward Ruscha
#8. You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.
Catherine Lacey
#9. To dance, above all, is to enter into the motions of life. It is an action, a movement, a process. The dance of life is not so much a metaphor as a fact; to dance is to know oneself alone and to celebrate it.
Sherman Paul
#10. Youth is like being carried through life by a strong current," Admiral Winter said. "All you feel is the speed of the river, the thrill of rapids, never comprehending your utter lack of control, your constant peril.
Andrea Cremer
#12. In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
Natasha Trethewey
#13. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
#14. For him I was like the land, something to care for...well, he loved to make things grow. But he resembled the land more than me. He needed constant cultivation, or the fruit turned wild.
Bruce-Novoa
#15. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.
David James Duncan
#16. The world is a room of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.
Adam Foulds
#17. I am heartbroken that this movie would cause anyone pain. It should be a source of joy. The story is a metaphor about how we try to stay in our own little bubbles, we don't let life in, we don't take the journey.
Swoosie Kurtz
#18. I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.
Deborah Copaken
#19. Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.
Steven Pinker
#20. A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.
Denis Donoghue
#22. But that's life right? It's just a shitty hand of cards. But then maybe somebody pulls out an Ace, and somebody else gets a four, or a ten. It's all in the draw and how you play it.
Mackenzie Herbert
#23. Well, I've been blessed with good hair, or at least some people think it is. It is the way it is, sort of does what it wants to. So, yeah, I guess it is [a metaphor for your views on art and life].
David Lynch
#24. Due to their short bloom time, Sakura blossoms are a metaphor for life itself: beautiful yet fleeting. You'll realize when you're as old as me to hang on to the good times because they won't last forever.
Shannon Mullen
#25. The particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.
Hanya Yanagihara
#26. It's a metaphor for life. If sports don't matter, then life doesn't matter.
Emily Giffin
#27. What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
Jeanette Winterson
#28. Of course a carp is just a carp, waiting to become either your pet, or a gefilte fish. But am I wrong to also see this body lying in a pool of blood, being fibbed about in plain sight, as a metaphor for all the corpses and blood never discussed?
Leela Corman
#29. I'm a believer in getting punched in the face. I know it sounds cliched, but to me, fighting is a metaphor for life.
Frank Grillo
#30. The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.
Alexandra Kleeman
#31. I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.
Frances Mayes
#32. Life is a metaphor for what's happening in your consciousness.
Deepak Chopra
#33. Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.
Seymour Papert
#34. The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.
Donna Farhi
#35. At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt to its precise application to tease the mind into active thought.
C. H. Dodd
#36. Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words.
Grant Morrison
#37. Life's a climb. But the view is great.
Miley Cyrus
#38. Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.
James Geary
#41. He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.
Hanya Yanagihara
#43. Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
Robert McKee
#44. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life - -and for me, for writing as well.
Haruki Murakami
#45. Training for me is a metaphor for life, period. The dedication, the determination, the desire, the work ethic, the great successes and the great failures - I take that into life.
Dwayne Johnson
#46. All of a sudden I discovered that I'm allergic to caviar. It was the perfect metaphor for my life. When I was only able to afford bad caviar, I could certainly eat my fill of it.
Larry David
#47. Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.
Rolf Potts
#48. It's a wonderful metaphor, catching a wave, for how you can look at other challenges in your life.
Jeff Bridges
#49. Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.
Joshua Mohr
#50. Ask yourself ... If my body were a metaphor for my life, what would the message be?
Denise Linn
#51. It's so much easier to shut the refrigerator door, which is totally a metaphor, I realize, for my life
Matthew Quick
#52. Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?
Chuck Palahniuk
#53. I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.
Padma Lakshmi
#54. From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.
Bao Shu
#55. For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion ... even God."
"It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor."
"Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.
Pam Houston
#56. ... and she was awed to see that vibrant life still struggled to thrive despite such destruction.
Lois Lowry
#57. Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote
#58. I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
Anna Deavere Smith
#59. My father toasted me mockingly with his glass. "Then eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die."
"Next week," Hades interrupted.
Zeus glowered at him. "Yes, obviously, but I was using a metaphor."
"No," his brother replied. "You were paraphrasing. Badly.
Tellulah Darling
#60. By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
Anna Quindlen
#61. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
Hannah Arendt
#62. Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.
Mahmoud Darwish
#63. Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
Phillip Adams
#64. Jerusalem has been - and for many, still is - a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith.
Amos Elon
#65. Life is a journey, the metaphor guides you to some conclusions: You should learn the terrain, pick a direction, find some good traveling companions, and enjoy the trip, because there may be nothing at the end of the road.
Jonathan Haidt
#66. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe # running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life,
Haruki Murakami
#67. This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.
Bryant A. Loney
#68. In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.
Hanya Yanagihara
#69. I was convinced that she was about to tell me my card was declined, and assumed Derek wanting to talk later meant he'd soon be telling me our life was declined. Everything, everyone had reached their limits with me.
Joshua Mohr
#70. Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
#71. I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
#73. ... The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.
Brian Greene
#74. I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk.
Tift Merritt
#75. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.
Sharon Olds
#76. Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.
Yann Martel
#77. Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.
John Green
#78. I do genuinely believe that young people who play sport at a competitive level, sensibly controlled, sensibly organised, that has to be a good thing. It will teach them to win, it will teach them to lose with dignity and magnanimity - all the things you want. It's a pretty good metaphor for life.
Sebastian Coe
#79. Life is a piece of art drawn by love on the canvas of hope with the colors of desires, wants, and needs.
Debasish Mridha
#80. whatever you're learning, see whether you can make a metaphor to help yourself understand the most difficult topic - you'll be surprised at how much it can bring the key idea to life.
Barbara Oakley
#81. That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages
becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.
Kelly Corrigan
#82. I explain at the parties that I believe knitting is a transformative and intriguing act that can change the life and brain of the person doing it, and that knitting is a perfect metaphor for life and insight into some better ways through it.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
#83. A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.
Lorna Dee Cervantes
#84. I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. During
Anna Quindlen
#85. As time passes in Heaven, the stars do not change places, not till the day when Zig changes the complete backdrop. I tell my students this is a metaphor for life; we go along thinking nothing will be different, till the day everything suddenly changes at once.
Neil Smith
#86. Quest stories are about the oldest form of narrative there is, and they're also the perfect metaphor for life because we're all on a journey trying to figure out where we're going and who we are. 'Solomon Creed' is just doing it with more danger and guns involved.
Simon Toyne
#87. It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, 'what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
Stephen King
#88. I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.
Olivia Sudjic
#89. Together a brick and a blanket create the perfect metaphor for life. Will you be a brick and make something of your life, or be a blanket and sleep your life away?
Amy Summers
#90. There's a metaphor in that somewhere - like all of life is about ending up somewhere you didn't expect, and learning to just be happy with it.
Lauren Oliver
#91. He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course - the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was.
Haruki Murakami
#93. It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow
such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father's fist.
Elissa Janine Hoole
#94. Right now, I'm standing behind the glass, and I guess that's a metaphor for how my life will be going forward.
Angela Ruggiero
#95. With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.
Chuck Palahniuk
#96. Maybe we're standing like coins on the edge?"
Allie considered this. "Meaning?"
"Meaning, we might be able to shake things up a little, and find a way to come up heads."
"Or tails," suggested Allie.
"What are you talking about?" said Lief.
"Life and death.
Neal Shusterman
#97. I couldn't have come up with a better metaphor for my life and my internal conflict. It amazes me how quickly we can manifest our fears; not only had I created my 'I'm never satisfied, I'll drive her away' nightmare.
Kenny Loggins
#98. I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.
Joseph Conrad
#99. Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life.
The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan.
The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.
Jaimal Yogis
#100. We all struggle. Life is not fun. A lot of times, it's really painful and hard. Sometimes it's really funny. 'Foxcatcher' is kind of like a metaphor for that.
Mark Schultz
