Top 100 Quotes About Metaphors
#1. The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.
Walter Brueggemann
#2. 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
#3. The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity, reason is the pace ... And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.
Thomas Hobbes
#4. 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
#5. There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
George Orwell
#6. 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
#7. For 16 years I spoke in trial metaphors, and perhaps I need to get out of that habit.
Trey Gowdy
#8. There are a thousand ways to look at it ... We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors ... But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters ... The metaphors have implications and imperfections.
John Green
#9. 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
#11. I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.
Rachel Hartman
#12. Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.
Florence King
#13. Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.
Dean Koontz
#14. 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
#15. Plastic metaphors and carbon copy similes that aren't going to do anything for anybody and it doesn't showcase creativity; it showcases the fact that the soul of the music has been compromised to control the industry.
Immortal Technique
#16. I am a musicologist, a doctor of music. Therefore I listened to, studied and analysed a lot of music. I also enjoy metaphors, the art of quoting and of cycles.
James Horner
#17. A Witch's work is mind work and utilizes powerful metaphors, allegories, and images that unlock the powers of the mind.
Laurie Cabot
#18. 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
#19. That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.
Aldous Huxley
#20. We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#21. While sin is sometimes thought of today as the breaking of a rule, these metaphors emphasize that it is the breaking of a relationship, an act of treachery against the Lord, the faithful covenant king and father and husband.
Keith L. Johnson
#22. People who want to climb mountains just like taking metaphors for real. So when I say I could murder for a mangosteen, I hope you don't think I'm going to go out and do that.
Initially NO
#23. I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.
Reza Aslan
#24. Metaphors are something grown-ups use when they can't set troublesome boys on fire.
Elizabeth Camden
#25. Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.
Ray Bradbury
#26. This is what writing does to you: it makes you put everything under a microscope of metaphors and similes, surrounded by memories and reminiscences. It flies you up high and leaves you without gravity, without reference, and absolutely without destination.
Ibraheem Hamdi
#27. Some would say the Creator is a lamb. Some would say he's a lion. Some would say both. The fact is, he is neither a lamb nor a lion. These are fiction. Metaphors. Yet the Creator is both a lamb and a lion. These are both truths.
Ted Dekker
#28. 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
#29. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto Bolano
#30. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
C.S. Lewis
#31. People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.
Jack Nicholson
#32. 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
#33. The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#34. And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
#35. Metaphors are like similes, the only difference is.
Aaron Davidson
#36. Similes are like metaphors.
H. Dean
#37. 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
#38. Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.
Alexander Pope
#39. It' hard to explain depression to people who haven't suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren't there. You have to resort to metaphors.
Matt Haig
#40. But metaphors can reduce the distance." "We're not metaphors." "I know, but metaphors eliminates what separates you and me.
Haruki Murakami
#41. Metaphors. This was the cost of making out with an artist.
Richelle Mead
#42. 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
#43. Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.
Neill Blomkamp
#44. 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
#45. Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
M.H. Abrams
#46. 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
#47. The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.
Dar Williams
#48. Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.
Giannina Braschi
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Suddenly, everything I'd ever read made sense. All of the cliches about electricity and drowning and falling and other sinister metaphors for a kiss all swept over me. It was nuclear fusion. It was the door to Narnia.
Lily Anderson
#52. I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
A.S. Byatt
#53. I love the way he talks. By the end, perhaps I'll be able to speak in majestic food metaphors like Reverend Richards.
A. J. Jacobs
#54. All wishes are best granted metaphorically. Metaphors are much easier to see than the real thing.
Rachael McKay
#55. Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.
Susannah Cahalan
#56. I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.
Charlie Kaufman
#57. One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It's like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.
Cheryl Strayed
#58. Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing.
Starhawk
#60. The whole purpose of our search for a 'unit of selection' is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose.
Richard Dawkins
#61. Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.
George Henry Lewes
#62. No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.
Avi Arad
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Metaphors are inserted in our language even when they do not stand out (did you notice that?) to us.
Niklas Torneke
#66. Loser lit antiheroes aren't well intentioned or earnest; they don't care whether you like them or not. They're self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.
Kate Christensen
#67. The application of gaming metaphors in non game contexts to influence behavior, improve motivation and enhance engagement.
Andrzej Marczewski
#68. In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors.
Ymatruz
#69. 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
#70. The conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors] ... to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.
Richard M. Rorty
#71. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Orson Scott Card
#72. I try to think of metaphors that suit him best, but he was made of the sea and the stars and the sun, and one wouldn't do him justice.
Zorgie Adriana Sanchez
#73. Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers,, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that's what it was really like.
Alexander McCall Smith
#74. The Bible offers three metaphors that teach us God's view of life: Life is a test, life is a trust, and life is a temporary assignment.
Rick Warren
#75. I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests.
Noah Cicero
#77. ...so much has been laid on the sunset - heavy-handed metaphors, sentimental music. Everyone's always walking into them, and that is some very intense light. Maybe that's where the term "love is blind" comes from, because so many people are walking into sunsets, burning out their corneas.
Kirk Farber
#78. I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.
Potter Stewart
#79. Someone is out there," I said. "Someone who has been manipulating the events. Playing puppet master, stirring the pot, stacking the deck - "
"Mixing metaphors?" Thomas suggested.
Jim Butcher
#80. I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis
#81. I'm more comfortable revealing myself than hiding behind metaphors. I respond to artists who reveal something of themselves.
Idina Menzel
#82. Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.
Gerhard Richter
#83. Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings.
Zia Haider Rahman
#84. And see those metaphors 'up front' and 'out in the open' are part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state which not only doesn't exist and never existed but it's usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever's making the judgments.
Jennifer Egan
#85. Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name.
G. Willow Wilson
#86. The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.
Anne Rice
#87. There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.
William H. Hunt
#88. Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.
Sam Keen
#89. There are two metaphors for Mario the person and not Mario the footballer. I think I am a man, but I don't believe I need to say it. But I could also be Peter Pan because I do things my own way and I am free. So, yes, maybe I should say that I am Peter Pan - although I am much more of a man.
Mario Balotelli
#90. By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are ... what again? Something
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
#91. The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.
Jan Struther
#92. I demand from a book harmony as unity and moderation; that determines the choice of words, the type and number of metaphors, the development and conclusion
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. I talk a lot in metaphors. I get my words out but sometimes they don't make sense.
David Boreanaz
#95. Enough of these phrases, conceit and metaphors,
I want burning, burning, burning.
Rumi
#96. Innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.
Steven Johnson
#97. We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.
James Gleick
#98. A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers and the crowd.
Victor Hugo
#99. I really like to cook. I used to do it lots for Mom, who's almost as useless as you, and it means I can practice describing all the different dishes. That always makes narratives seem less repetitive - and you can use them as metaphors, too.
Stephfordy Mayo
#100. Some say Hollywood movies that are made about boxing are just metaphors for other things, I think I've made one that's actually about boxing and not a metaphor.
Walter Hill
