Top 100 Quotes About Metaphors
#1. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
Henry David Thoreau
#3. 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
#4. Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.
Marie Rutkoski
#5. 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
#6. The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.
Alain De Botton
#7. I hate metaphors. That's why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal.
Ron Swanson
#8. The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.
Charles Simic
#9. 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
#10. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction.
G. Willow Wilson
#11. 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
#12. Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.
Julian Jaynes
#18. 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
#19. Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them.
David Brin
#20. Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.
Richard Whately
#21. 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
#22. We are such materialists that all our metaphors are going to be material.
J. T. Walsh
#23. 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
#24. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.
Milan Kundera
#25. Between the beach and the big breaking waves about a quarter mile off was a stretch of bumpy, glistening reef, its usual blanket of water pulled back by a celestial hand.
Mary Ellen Hannibal
#26. 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
#27. Metaphors are a window into the soul and carry us across the boundary between the lower and higher selves, connecting us to the universal energy field and the collective consciousness.
Heidi DuPree
#28. Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
Joseph Campbell
#29. So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.
Amara Lakhous
#30. 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
#31. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all.
Laura Resnick
#36. Oh, I know. But it's like my eyes are forcing those patterns on stars that aren't really lined up the right way to make them." There was another moment of silence, then Amos said, "That's, like, one of them metaphors, right?" "It is now." "Buy
James S.A. Corey
#37. 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
#38. The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
Aristotle.
#39. Immigration is a kind of pilgrimage. That's the way I see it. Just to go back to the desert, biblical metaphors, that's the story of great migration right there, the Old Testament.
Ruben Martinez
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The use of food metaphors is really well established English ... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.
Erin McKean
#43. To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid. And
Michel De Montaigne
#44. 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
#45. Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.
Octavio Paz
#46. Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.
Ray Bradbury
#47. The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists,
Yann Martel
#49. You don't organize metaphors ... you explode them.
Ray Bradbury
#50. Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.
Chip Heath
#51. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing ... metaphors support lyrics like bones.
Pat Pattison
#52. The river is one of my favorite metaphors, the symbol of the great flow of Life Itself. The river begins at Source, and returns to Source, unerringly. This happens every single time, without exception. We are no different.
Jeffrey R. Anderson
#53. I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.
Brandon Sanderson
#54. My fans have always loved my metaphors.
R. Kelly
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. You're mixing your metaphors. It gives me a headache.
Holly Black
#59. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#61. Metaphors for God drawn from human experience can easily be literalized. While we are immediately aware that the personal God is not really a rock or a mother eagle, it is easy enough to imagine that God is really a king or a father.
Sandra Marie Schneiders
#62. Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
Milan Kundera
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The fundamentals of hip-hop still play an important role, cause it's about those similes, those metaphors, those parallels. And to some people it's just about, "Man, I'm really relating to the lifestyle."
Pusha T
#68. She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.
Mahmoud Darwish
#70. A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.
Neil Postman
#71. Voice really depends on the answer to the question, Who is telling this story? ... That will color your diction-and determine your metaphors, your sensibility.
Philip Gerard
#72. Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.
Sarah Hall
#73. Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God. ... And when the metaphors fail, we think it's God who's failed us!
Mary Doria Russell
#74. 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
#75. Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom.
I. A. Richards
#76. The most colossal display of wise, inspiring,
and humorous metaphors ever exhibited in one place.
Richard Lederer
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
Robert Hass
#82. Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity.
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
#83. 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
#84. In most cases I don't even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.
Ray Bradbury
#85. Chelsea clapped her hand over her heart, melodramatically. "Using my love of chocolate against me. I have no choice but to crumble like a ... chocolate cookie. Or whatever," She said when Laurel eyed her. "My metaphors suck. Let's go.
Aprilynne Pike
#86. She doesn't know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow.
Amber Sparks
#87. 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
#88. An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.
Carl Jung
#89. You do realize you just mixed Disney metaphors, right? Disney metaphors. Wow, Calla, now I'm just sad for you.
Andrea Cremer
#90. Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.
Jane Hirshfield
#91. Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a "life-is-like-this" on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.
Chila Woychik
#92. The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.
Bernard Levin
#93. And metaphors like cats behind your smile,
Each one wound up to purr,
each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside ( ... )
Ray Bradbury
#94. It is permissible to be the god of your own metaphors.
Rachel Hartman
#95. Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many
Chip Heath
#96. "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
#97. 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
#98. Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely.
Deb Caletti
#99. 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
#100. He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive.
Walter J. Moore
