Metaphor Quotes - Page 14

• 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

  Badass, Independent, Cat

  "Anne Hathaway Talks Fighting in Heels, Adapting to Nolan’s Universe, Filming in IMAX and More on the Set of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES". Interview on the Set, collider.com. May 27, 2012.

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• Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.

  R. S. Thomas

  Two, Giving, Imagination

  "Selected Prose" by R. S. Thomas, (p. 131), 1995.

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• 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

  Art, Believe, Difficult Questions

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• Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

  Amy Waldman

  Religious, Emotional, Community

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• People will listen to sophisticated physicists, using God as a kind of metaphor for the deep constants, the deep problems, the deep principles of physics, and say that in that sense I believe in God. The reaction is, "Oh, this great physicist believes in God - that means I'm free to believe in the trinity and in the crucifixion and in the reincarnation of Christ" - and all that stuff, which of course has nothing whatever to do with the fundamental constants of physics, which is what these physicists are talking about.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Mean, Talking

  "Faith and Reason" Interview, www.pbs.org.

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• Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Poetry, Algebra, Higher

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• truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Coins, Forgotten, Illusion

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• Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Time, Space, Causality

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1979). “Philosophy and truth: selections from Nietzsche's notebooks of the early 1870's”, Humanities Pr

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• 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

  Running, Two Sides, Long

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• Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.

  Johan Huizinga

  Civilization, Culture, Disease

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• Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.

  Robert Grudin

  Time, Art, Students

  Robert Grudin (1997). “Time and the Art of Living”, p.2, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Rain, Illustration, Ideas

  Jane Austen (2016). “Jane Austen The Dover Reader”, p.516, Courier Dover Publications

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• A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.

  Edward Tufte

  Design, Maps, Information

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• Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Mirrors, Cells

  Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, p.388, Simon and Schuster

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• Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

  Susan Sontag

  Unjust, Illness, Used

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.56, Penguin UK

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• The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Journey, Voyages

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• Metaphor is embodied in language.

  Dennis Potter

  Language

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• Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Buddhist, Night, Flames

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• Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.

  Taner Edis

  Writing, Heart, Reality

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• Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.

  Stephen Shore

  Art, Mean, Levels

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• It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

  Hortense Calisher

  Writing, Phrases, Stories

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• 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

  Christian, Religious, Wall

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• I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Life, Boxing, Goes On

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “On Boxing”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
  Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor.

  Ogden Nash

  Would Be, Employment, Literature

  1945 Many LongYears Ago,'Very Like A Whale'.

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• 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

  Suicide, Thinking, Guy

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