Top 100 Metaphorical Quotes
#1. The problem is Twitter is designing the metaphorical equivalent of a Toyota Prius. A car for the masses. While I want a Formula One race car.
Robert Scoble
#2. Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth?
Haruki Murakami
#3. And I have faith that you'll make a wonderful head of the Council someday, Sophie.
Yeah, except for that whole sleeping with the enemy part, I thought. Wait, not that I would actually be sleeping with ... I mean, it's a metaphor. There would only be metaphorical sleeping.
Rachel Hawkins
#4. Mysticism and the supernatural are embedded in the show - it's called 'Da Vinci's Demons' for a reason, and it's not just metaphorical.
David S.Goyer
#5. As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.
- (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#6. I think of these qualities as metaphorical, you know? So black magic is whatever leads people to the dark side - their own greed or insecurity that makes them do destructive things.
Christina Baker Kline
#7. I think that was E.T.'s central appeal, personally. E.T. is this metaphorical journey, this strange Odysseus from another world, who just wants to go home. Obviously, home must've been better!
Frederick Lenz
#8. If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.
Peter Watts
#9. If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.
Salman Rushdie
#10. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
Jandy Nelson
#11. What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.
Mark Haddon
#12. My belief is that 'heaven' and 'hell' are metaphorical terms for what you make of your life. In any instant, you have the ability to make your life total pleasure or total hell.
Kelly Slater
#13. I think all writing about art is in some way dancing to architecture. It's all about similitude, being analogous, metaphorical, adjectival, etc.
Rob Chapman
#14. It all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face.
Norman Mailer
#15. I just like, when you look at people who have long careers in film, they're able to make films that are far away from themselves, because they're metaphorical. It creates more opportunities, I think.
Mike Birbiglia
#16. Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.
John Searle
#17. Drake, I'd like to collaborate with. He's a phenomenal lyricist. Probably the best rapper in the world at the moment. I love Kanye but there's something about Drake; he's more straight up, really clever and really poetic and metaphorical - I love that. He's just clever.
Ellie Goulding
#18. Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races ... very handy.
Terry Pratchett
#19. In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It's written for writing's sake, as if I were to say, "Let me tell you I'm dying." Well of course I am. So are you.
Chila Woychik
#20. We do two things in life: We race the clock and everything is a struggle. One way or not, it's a metaphorical battle all of the time.
Sylvester Stallone
#21. Every human is a school subject. This is rather a metaphorical way of saying it, to put it straight, those you love are few, and the ones you detest are many.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#22. Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!
They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!
Fred Van Lente
#23. The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.
Sam Keen
#24. Also I just think I've been lucky enough to have great parents, and I've had good people around me who have always been honest with me, who would give me a purely metaphorical slap if I ever got too big for my boots.
Daniel Radcliffe
#25. What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.
Nicholas Carr
#27. Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#28. "The River" [song] is also, yes, very metaphorical. Rivers are cleansing. As long as human beings have been on the Earth we've used rivers to cleanse ourselves. And, for me, the lyrics "something in the river," I think is - well, the river is a metaphor for where I was at the time.
Ladyhawke
#29. Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.
Anne Fadiman
#30. The economy is just a metaphorical device, it's not real-that's why it's got the word "con" in the middle of it.
Russell Brand
#31. Be aware of textural elements throughout a party, like silverware, stemware, and linens. But the biggest element is metaphorical: it's your own touch. How are you making people feel?
Danny Meyer
#32. Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine's heady, gin is poisonous, vodka's cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I'm a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.
Cate Marvin
#33. And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?
Owen Barfield
#34. So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.
Joe Hill
#35. If your mother had any idea we were talking about this, she'd skin me alive. I'm not being metaphorical about that. I think she could actually, literally skin me. She gets these wild eyes sometimes. There's Cossack blood in her; I'd bet anything.
Claudia Gray
#36. I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.
Ray Bradbury
#37. Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressives have lately been losing to conservatives. Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral, emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns.
George Lakoff
#38. Creativity is the art that can give rise to visionary metaphorical relationships, as opposed to purely psy-chological ones.
Carl Jung
#39. You should approach each book
you should approach life
with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.
Sherman Alexie
#40. 'Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.
Neil Postman
#41. But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.
Ulrich Beck
#42. We spend an inordinate amount of time indoors, and the physical confinement limits the metaphorical bubble of our aspirations. Large rooms, like the vaulted interior of a church, are uplifting. Outdoors, we are free to reach for the sky.
David Miller
#43. The caveman in me was pretty proud of myself as I did the metaphorical Tarzan beat-on-the-ole-chest routine. Good thing I was smart enough to keep my trap shut about it.
Raine Miller
#44. After the original rapture of conversion had settled in, (Bob) Dylan backed away from his obviously Christian lyrics and returned to his more metaphorical use of language.
Ron Jacobs
#45. All knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical (or analogical) modes of perception and thought.
Denis Leary
#46. What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness.
John Fowles
#47. For the Romans, gravitas denoted a man's metaphorical "heaviness" - a strength of purpose, sense of authority, depth of character, and commitment to the task at hand that together formed a structure sturdy enough to bear the weight of his significant responsibilities
Brett McKay
#48. Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.
Joseph Campbell
#49. Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
W. H. Auden
#50. The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.
Iain McGilchrist
#51. In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.
Paul Scott
#52. Helen's words had hit Quentin like a weed whacker stuck down the front of his underwear and turned on high. And not the wimpy electric models, but the four-stroke gas engine that produce enough RPMs to turn his junk into noodle soup and effectively emasculate him. Fortunately it was metaphorical.
Jay Barry
#53. I don't know which Bible stories ought to be treated as historically accurate, scientifically provable accounts of facts and which stories are meant to be metaphorical. I don't know if it really matters so long as those stories transform my life.
Rachel Held Evans
#54. The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
George Lakoff
#55. Having a magical element in a realistic setting without explanation seems to me to be the hallmark of fairy tales, which present us with a kind of metaphorical look at some aspect of our lives.
Laurie Foos
#56. An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.
Steven Pinker
#57. There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.
Tana French
#58. Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light.
Ken Macrorie
#59. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science ... Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts. The arts ... also nourish our craving for the mystical.
E. O. Wilson
#60. Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy - it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite.
Jane Espenson
#61. Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A
Kim Stanley Robinson
#62. Six hundred years is an awfully long time, Ever. So long it's impossible for either of us to imagine. Though it is more than enough time to rack up a few dirty skeletons for the old metaphorical closet, right?
Alyson Noel
#63. I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
Umberto Eco
#64. Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.
Carl Sandburg
#65. Just as we know when we strike a metaphorical nerve with someone, we also know when we tap into what inspires them.
Elaina Marie
#66. Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, 'This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.'
Will Self
#67. The life of an individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#68. I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.
Charlie Kaufman
#69. Point the way,' he was talking in metaphorical terms. This pointing-hand gesture - with its index finger and thumb extended upward - is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears
Dan Brown
#70. Clearly, America has no shortage of metaphorical opportunities for the poor.
Stephen Colbert
#71. Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
Julian Baggini
#72. I know what it meant. I worked it out myself. I've been reading about it. It was a metaphorical death. Sometimes the cards speak in metaphors. It's me. I'm dead on the inside, I've felt it for a long time. As if I died and everything that's happening is someone else's strange and awful dream.
Kate Morton
#73. 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
#74. I shall live forever. And I don't mean in a metaphorical sense. I don't mean I'll live forever in the hearts and minds of my readers. I mean I will literally live forever, drawing as I do from your pain and suffering.
Your pain makes me strong.
Derek Landy
#75. A metaphorical weight lifted from his allegorical chest and Artemis Fowl felt himself again.
Eoin Colfer
#76. The fantastical images in my works are descriptive in a different way - a metaphorical way - that removes you from reality. Then, this visually removed point of view allows you to deal with a very heavy subject.
Signe Baumane
#77. My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.
Thomm Quackenbush
#78. A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.
Alice McDermott
#79. It was an allegorical, metaphorical, rhetorical question.
Billy Phillips
#80. By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery,
James Geary
#81. Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.
Salman Rushdie
#82. Magic of Southern expressions? Similes and metaphorical allusions. They are the yellow highlighter of conversation.
Tim Heaton
#83. For speed Bone had buried his pack half a day back, and thus as he stood he laced the boots together and tied them to his belt, so that their jostling could deliver a metaphorical kick in the behind.
Chris Willrich
#85. At the millennium we partied like it was 1999. And then we had a 10 year bathtub tequila hangover, man. Just hugging the metaphorical toilet on a daily basis.
Christopher Titus
#86. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression American and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years.
Lucius Shepard
#87. Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#88. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
George Lakoff
#89. You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances ... - Hazel Grace Lancaster
John Green
#90. Los Angeles had its faults, metaphorical and geophysical, but it was not a malicious place. People were nice here. Hollywood was the grade school teacher who started you off with an "A" until you failed. New York was the one who gave you an "F" until you proved you deserved better.
Sloane Crosley
#91. They were handy to have around, Nate's little gang. They were that wonderful combination of talented and noble. The former was useful, while the latter made it so incredibly easy to poke them with a metaphorical stick.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#92. The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.
Northrop Frye
#93. An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.
Gloria E. Anzaldua
#94. If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
#95. Wallowing in the metaphorical mud of life helps pass time but doesn't really achieve much of any lasting value.
Steven Redhead
#96. Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.
John L'Heureux
#97. Instead of of being so metaphorical with the rhyme, I was encouraged to go straight at it and hit it dead on and not waste time trying to cover things.
Tupac Shakur
#98. What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.
Naomi Klein
#99. If I had to come up with a single metaphorical device to express what is missing in childhood now it would be something on the order of string: the tie that binds, the thread of connection, the weave of narrative, the web of life." NOAH'S CHILDREN
Sara Stein
#100. There're a lot of odd things going on
but I feel like I'm slowly getting
closer to the truth."
-"Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting
closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?
Haruki Murakami
