Top 100 Metaphor Quotes
#3. WARNING: This little book is a bullet to the head. Or, for a less violent metaphor, this is the door marked EXIT. You can either go through and beyond or just know it's there, waiting for you, ever-present for when you're in need of a way out.
Graham Ellis
#4. I felt shocked and then saddened. life does this to you sometimes - leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit, to mix a metaphor.
William Boyd
#5. I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.
Seth Lloyd
#6. I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness.
Seneca.
#7. The Metaphor is one of thoughts most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing.
Alistair Gray
#8. It's always a metaphor when a bird shits on your head.
Seth Kupchick
#9. Sachish became so aware of her that his mystic trance broke. He could no longer regard her as a metaphor for a transcendental mood.
Rabindranath Tagore
#10. Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ...
Wallace Stevens
#11. Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.
Rick Yancey
#12. If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety - as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.
Daniel Smith
#13. The Internet is to our intellectual life what the universal unconscious is to our psychological life. In fact, the Internet is the new universal unconscious. It's not even a metaphor anymore.
Phillip DePoy
#14. Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
John Updike
#15. In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
Steve Erickson
#17. He looked as though I'd just run over his pet puppy (though no actual puppies were harmed in the formation of that metaphor).
Ally Carter
#18. Perhaps Calder's secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate.
Blue Balliett
#19. Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
Evelyn Waugh
#20. He disapproved of the metaphor: he wanted to tell her that one shouldn't compare one's personal unhappiness to the most horrible crime in history.
Brian Morton
#21. Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde is a metaphor for alcoholism. He drinks a potion, becomes a monster. I know exactly how he feels.
Craig Ferguson
#22. It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
Audre Lorde
#23. I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
Jane Smiley
#24. There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.
Hugh Laurie
#25. When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.
John Fowles
#26. A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief.
Kelly Link
#27. Magnus, remember what happened the last time you tried to tango. Your shoe flew off and nearly killed someone."
"It was a metaphor. He's a Shadowhunter, he's a Lightwood, and he's into blonds. He's a dating hazard.
Cassandra Clare
#28. Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.
Nan Shepherd
#29. We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention.
Adam Gopnik
#30. I simply like the monumentality of the subjects - the opportunity for metaphor and the varied light that comes with high altitudes.
Robert Genn
#31. Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY. The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent.
Steven Pinker
#32. The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.
James Balog
#33. What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.
Paul Theroux
#34. The hares of the dawn'
the ingenuous metaphor of the cowboy poet
are the little round clouds on the horizon behind the dark fringe of the thicket, golden in the sunrise.
Romulo Gallegos
#35. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.
Jane Austen
#36. I'm super happy to see the record doing its thing and for people to like it, but for me, I had a great victory just as a person. I overstepped countless obstacles by creating that record. And the record's a metaphor for the personal steps I [took] throughout the past year.
Justin Vernon
#37. Mind you," said Ponder, "the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death - " "Chicken soup and croutons," said Ridcully. "Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination".
Terry Pratchett
#38. Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel - just as fire does.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#39. A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.
Mason Cooley
#40. Out of Box" is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective.
Pearl Zhu
#41. There, at the centre, are the artists who really form the consciousness of their time; they respond deeply, intuitively to what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen, and their response is expressed in metaphor, in image and in fable.
John Wain
#42. Far from being the rock or island in the Simon and Garfunkel song, it turns out that the best metaphor to describe the human body is 'sponge.
Rick Smith
#44. The debt ceiling debacle is almost a horrible metaphor: It's as if a bomb went off at 800 Pennsylvania Avenue and sent shrapnel flying in every direction. I don't know what these guys think they're doing, but it looks like they're committing political suicide.
Charlie Cook
#45. It is a metaphor for life, perhaps, in that everything is a metaphor for life. The berry season is short. So how full, exactly, do I intend to fill the box? Or, if we slice away the metaphor, we could just ask this: what does the good life look like for me?
Laura Vanderkam
#46. Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
Robert Frost
#47. This is a comment on fear. Today it's like 'They're going to bomb the New York subway and there's the avian flu and 50 million of us are going to die.' We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we've been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.
Adam Gollner
#48. A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.
Oliver Goldsmith
#49. The cottage pie was about as wholesome and straightforward as you could get. It was food for winter evenings and happy days. And the salad was rich, complicated, a little bit sweet, and seemed to be trying way too hard to be impressive. We'd both served each other a metaphor.
Alexis Hall
#50. The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.
J.H. Wyman
#51. Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
Andre Breton
#52. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain.
Rabih Alameddine
#53. CAMPBELL: All poets. Poetry is a metaphorical language. MOYERS: A metaphor suggests potential. CAMPBELL: Yes, but it also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.
Joseph Campbell
#54. Most people, including yourself, apparently, think The Moldau is about a river. It is not. It is a metaphor. It is about the progress of life, from its fragile beginnings through its joys and turbulence and on to its end, its magnificent end.
Gerald Elias
#55. We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.
Rick Perlstein
#56. I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
Antonio R. Damasio
#57. People in Haiti eat dirt because it gives their starving bodies a false sense of satisfaction. But mud pies don't fill. They merely mask real hunger. [...] I saw the mud pies as a metaphor for the life of any Christian who has ever looked to something or someone other than God for fulfillment.
Jennifer Dukes Lee
#58. The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.
Marion Woodman
#59. Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.
Bill Bradley
#60. But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.
Donald Antrim
#61. I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.
Max Black
#62. The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.
Steve Jobs
#63. Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#64. It is not unusual for the central menace of a work of horror fiction to be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.
H.P. Lovecraft
#65. The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.
Tom Stoppard
#66. Effective metaphor does more than shed light on the two things being compared. It actually brings to the mind's eye something that has never before been seen. It's not just the marriage ceremony linking two things; it's the child born from the union.
Rebecca McClanahan
#67. Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#68. It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious.
Stacy Schiff
#69. [H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)]
Salman Rushdie
#70. Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.
Norman Mailer
#71. I twisted words, phrases, and idioms around,
and deftly nixed the budding metaphor bounds.
Voila, a virtual book in a blog became softbound!
Rebecca Rose Orton
#72. A metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.
Max Black
#74. That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
Malcolm Gladwell
#75. Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
James Russell Lowell
#76. Calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.
Os Guinness
#77. I loved Catwoman's sense of humor. I love how sly she is. I love how she, to use a cat metaphor, walks the fence and you don't know which side she's going to come down on. She's totally independent. And let's face it, she's badass.
Anne Hathaway
#80. But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.
Julian Barnes
#81. I always thought of vampires, especially the young-adult ones, as a metaphor for sex - sucking blood, forbidden, taboo. I think they just ooze sex. Vampires are all the big themes in life in one attractive, bloodsucking package.
Melissa De La Cruz
#82. I love sports. Anytime I can combine sports with a film I'm a happy guy. It's such a natural fit, because sports always seems to be a metaphor for life. Always, always, always.
Dean Cain
#83. A satyagrahi may not ride two horses, truth and untruth, at the same time, nor, to change the metaphor, trim his sail to catch every breeze as you do in the name of communism.
Mahatma Gandhi
#84. If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.
Ian Anderson
#85. When raindrops hit the tin roof it's crazy. That's a metaphor, did I lose you baby?
Drake
#86. Without the theological aspect, the emphasis on adoption too easily is seen as mere charity. Without the missional aspect, the doctrine of adoption too easily is seen as mere metaphor.
Russell D. Moore
#87. Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.
Harrison Ford
#88. Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
John Le Carre
#89. The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting ...
Daniel Ellsberg
#90. The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
Mahmoud Darwish
#91. He hesitated. "Nothing, man. What are you doing right now?"
I looked down. "Petting my snake."
Malcolm laughed. "With anyone else, that would be a metaphor. Good thing I can always count on you.
Diana Peterfreund
#92. They see me as a symbol, and not a human being. That way they can kill me, say it's not murder it's a metaphor.
Ani DiFranco
#93. The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
Northrop Frye
#94. I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms.
Munia Khan
#95. People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.
Craig Venter
#96. I was interested in this relationship between the armed robber and the banker who were from different worlds but had similar goals. It was kind of a metaphor for this larger marriage of the banks selling off their debt and these street guys scrapping over it.
Jake Halpern
#97. It was Vyasa's genius to take the whole great Mahabharata epic and see it as metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart.
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
#98. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Northrop Frye
#99. Life is a metaphor for what's happening in your consciousness.
Deepak Chopra
#100. 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
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