Top 100 Metaphors In Quotes
#1. All the metaphors in this world wouldn't scratch the surface of what stepping into darkness is like for me. And that's just darkness. Don't get me started on light. Really, don't get me started on light.
Glen Duncan
#2. I marveled over the cosmic metaphors in my life. Found that all I needed to see and all I needed to know; all I needed to understand could be found in a constellation shaped like the Big Dipper.
Brandi L. Bates
#3. Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.
Steven Pinker
#4. I didn't reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later, with the request "Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver," I'm sure it contained those as well.)
Lois Lowry
#5. There's magic and metaphors in music superior to any other art form. An exquisite alchemy is involved in mixing pieces of your self and soul into the precisely perfect blend of harmonies, melodies, and lyrics that strike a chord.
A.J. Compton
#6. Don't use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally. Or they may take them figuratively - but if so, they'll also take your magics and transformations figuratively. Either way, you're in trouble.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden
#7. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#8. I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
George Steiner
#9. The application of gaming metaphors in non game contexts to influence behavior, improve motivation and enhance engagement.
Andrzej Marczewski
#10. We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live.
Luci Shaw
#11. If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied.
Steven Pinker
#12. He's out there waiting for us. We his the street, and we're ducks in a barrel. (Steele)
Isn't that fish in a barrel? (Syd)
Don't fuck with my metaphors right now, Syd. Can't you see that I'm under stress? (Steele)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#13. Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it - which always amounts to the same.
Jacques Derrida
#14. Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie.
Peter Gould
#15. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction.
G. Willow Wilson
#16. Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.
Sam Keen
#17. The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.
Jonathan Raban
#19. I definitely write about my life and the issues I might have or the dilemmas I'm going through, but usually I write about it in a general way and make metaphors. Like "I'm the wolf and you are the moon ".
Oh Land
#20. The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody's metaphors for it; I'd said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.
Brandon Sanderson
#21. I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.
Vik Muniz
#22. Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
Joseph Campbell
#23. When I'm directing actors, I often find myself slipping in sports metaphors, like: 'Don't go for the punch line here, just put it up on a T-ball stand so she can hit it out of the park.'
Mark Waters
#24. love ridden
i searched for you
in corridors,
open doors
and in endless seas
of similes
and metaphors
but we never were
on the same page.
K.Y. Robinson
#25. The similarity between space and time is limpid enough that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity also shows up in everyday metaphors where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time.
Steven Pinker
#26. When you say 'he has seen the light' you sound as if you mean 'corrupted,' " he said. "Something like that, yes. Different worlds, Commander. Down here, it would be unwise to trust your metaphors. To see the light is to be blinded. Do you not know that in the darkness, the eyes open wider?
Terry Pratchett
#27. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They're more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.
Loretta Lux
#29. Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.
Shirin Neshat
#30. for those memories are now
just like these little kittens
I hold in my hands
those can be kissed
and treasured
but not held too tightly.
Sanober Khan
#31. For underground metaphors, you can scrape an inch below the turf.
For what it's worth, my style's been developed in the core of the Earth.
The exhale's volcanic, the inhale is seismic ...
J-Live
#32. Ezekiel and his fellow prophets have become my heroes. They were fearless. They literalized metaphors. They turned their lives into protest pieces. They proved that, in the name of truth, sometimes you can't be afraid to take a left turn from polite society and look absurd.
A. J. Jacobs
#33. They ate dinner in silence. Her husband did not look at her. her face annoyed him, he did not know why. She could be good-looking but there were times when she was not. Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which ought to have been thrown away. Tonight it was like that.
James Salter
#34. 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
#35. I feel like metaphors are best when they spin in place. Like when they work and don't work, or lead to a bigger question.
Jordan Wolfson
#36. In essence, we string theorists have been trying to work out the score of the universe, the harmonies of the universe, the mathematical vibrations that the strings would play. So musical metaphors have been with us in science since the beginning.
Brian Greene
#37. The most colossal display of wise, inspiring,
and humorous metaphors ever exhibited in one place.
Richard Lederer
#38. I'm interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire
Gregory Crewdson
#39. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in color. The life of the senses was
described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the
morbid confessions of a modern sinner.
Charlotte Bronte
#40. Myths and dreams," according to Joseph Campbell, "are manifestations in image form (metaphors) of all of the energies of the body, moved by the organs, in conflict with each other.
James Bonnet
#41. Well, [bluntness in songwriting]'s a lot cheaper than therapy ... There's been a lot of things going on for the past 10 years that I just never really confronted, or used metaphors to do so. This time out I wanted to make sure that everyone knows what I'm talking about and where I'm coming from.
Brent Smith
#42. In most cases I don't even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.
Ray Bradbury
#43. An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.
Carl Jung
#44. "Money to Burn" is a fantasy. I mean, I would love for that to be a true story. Most of my songs are written in metaphors.
Ladyhawke
#45. Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.
James Geary
#46. We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.
Brandon Sanderson
#47. The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.
Saul Bass
#48. There I am then back in the saddle, in my numbed heart a prick of misgiving, like one dying of cancer obliged to consult his dentist.
Samuel Beckett
#49. I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.
Laurie Foos
#50. When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily
in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.
Deborah Tannen
#51. We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#52. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
Stephen Jay Gould
#53. It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.
Deborah Tannen
#54. When Sabine parted her lips to argue, Lanthe said, "This baby bird's gotta fly, sis." "Great," Sabine drawled. "She's already speaking in avian metaphors.
Kresley Cole
#55. 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
#56. It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.
Conrad Hall
#57. Rama's experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In
Jaron Lanier
#58. Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night.
Yukio Mishima
#59. In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
Cat Stevens
#60. I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.
Haruki Murakami
#61. We think we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, yet we possess only metaphors of the things, which in no way correspond to the original essences. Just
Friedrich Nietzsche
#62. About the fearful sphere which we inhabit, whose centre may be calculated and whose circumference is physically established, there spin metaphors whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference shows itself only through holes in the dark.
Michael Ayrton
#63. The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.
Jack D. Zipes
#64. Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.
George Lakoff
#65. I love metaphors. I've never been on this train ... If I'm standing on the middle of a track, I'm definitely going to get derailed. I have to make sure that I'm on the train and not in front of it.
Serena Williams
#66. Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Florence King
#67. Look, dudes, we didn't come this far down the rabbit hole to stop on the one-yard line in the middle of like Nazi headquarters," said Nick. "Did we?" "No, but if you tried, you could probably mix a few more metaphors," said Elise.
Mark Frost
#68. Photographs offer more than decisive moments. They are not alone, they add and subtract and change with time. They are metaphors for our lives ... Even a static photograph can change in the blink of a day or decade.
Edmundo Desnoes
#69. Inglis is full of metaphors about hands because they've been so important to our human development. It'll come in handy, we say. This child's a handful, and This is getting out of hand, or You're in good hands.
Sheila Finch
#70. Joy Rains has a gift. A gift for explaining abstract concepts like meditation through clever analogies and metaphors. FOR THE FIRST TIME in my hectic, harried life I actually UNDERSTAND how meditation is supposed to work and WHY I should give it a TRY!
Elisabeth Leamy
#71. The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, "Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear.
Ryan Lilly
#72. Metaphors are one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal as a presenter. In today's fast-paced world of communication, a well-thought-out metaphor acts as a shortcut to meaning.
Bruna Martinuzzi
#73. Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#74. To fully express their feelings, women assume poetic license and use various superlatives, metaphors, and generalizations. Men mistakenly take these expressions literally. Because they misunderstand the intended meaning, they commonly react in an unsupportive manner.
John Gray
#75. Which is the woman, which the child? The joyous laugh that opens doors, steals sugared moments from the shelf? Or the dreamer mixing metaphors with tears to make a book of self To read aloud in winter's rooms When summer's sounds have ceased to bloom?
Katie Louchheim
#76. The entire repertoire of our life experiences can be accessed and activated from the body in movement ... every part and function of the body can also be understood as metaphors for the expression of our being
Daria Halprin
#77. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.
George Lakoff
#78. I'm interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.
Rob Bell
#80. Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.
All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?"
They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.
Steven Pressfield
#81. Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors.
Lily Koppel
#82. For 16 years I spoke in trial metaphors, and perhaps I need to get out of that habit.
Trey Gowdy
#83. Some of my favorite media is the still cartoon that you can sit and study. You can get amazing metaphors across really quickly. I'm in awe of a Charles Schulz.
Bob Peterson
#84. He whirled round and round in his rapid love; it pricked him on the breastbone like a needle. He wanted to be shut up in a small space to think about it. He wanted to grab it and eat it like an apple so that nobody else could have it.
Jean Stafford
#85. Because everything you perceive is a metaphor for
something your brain is not equipped to fully understand.
God is as real as the clothes you are wearing and the chair
you are sitting in. They are all metaphors for something you
will never understand.
Scott Adams
#86. That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.
Aldous Huxley
#87. We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#88. Plenty of things in the universe are old, my dear. That's like saying Florida is a metaphor for hell because they're both hot - though your grandfather would agree wholeheartedly with that, I suppose.
Sammy Nickalls
#89. It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare's plays are full of ocean metaphors ("take arms against a sea of troubles," "an ocean of salt tears," "wild sea of my conscience") and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere.
Bill Bryson
#90. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto Bolano
#91. People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.
Jack Nicholson
#92. The joyous clamor in my mind drowned out the strange sound outside the car: a humming noise that was gathering speed and growing louder, a roar that was not the waves curling up the beach.
Padma Venkatraman
#93. No nation was better at creating metaphors for itself than America; in this case, the vision of a beautiful, sane, safe, marble future that is all dream and no marble to sustain it.
Dan Simmons
#94. No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.
Max Black
#95. God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.
Christina, Queen Of Sweden
#96. You see them in the mercury
light of water, the expanding
orbs of silver where trout
breathe. You hear
them in the sleepy kiss
of rainfall on pine
needles, smell them
as if they were snow
to the west.
Ken Craft
#97. Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
J.G. Ballard
#98. The ogres and witches and giants of fairytales stand in as metaphors for those obstacles that we all face in our own lives.
Kate Forsyth
#99. I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors ... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.
John Divola
#100. For somewhere," said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, "there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!
Agatha Christie
