Metaphor Quotes - Page 24

• A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Fashion, Ignorance, Order

  "On the Ladies' Passion for Levelling All Distinction of Dress". Essay by Oliver Goldsmith,

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.

  Jan Struther

  Gardening, Worst, Knows

  Jan Struther (1940). “Mrs. Miniver”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let me take up your metaphor. Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones, never.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Friendship, Precious Stones, Broken

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The Works of Walter Savage Landor”, p.4

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Safe Harbor is a state of mind... its the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.

  Luanne Rice

  Song, Beach, Prayer

  4 Copy quote

• When raindrops hit the tin roof it's crazy. That's a metaphor, did I lose you baby?

  Drake

  Life, Relationship, Break Up

  19 Copy quote

• The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.

  Aristotle

  Perception, Genius, Talent

  Aristotle (2016). “Pocket Aristotle”, p.352, Simon and Schuster

  105 Copy quote

  Show source

• Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.

  Bill Bradley

  Basketball, Sports, Selfish

  Bill Bradley (2010). “Life on the Run”, p.75, RosettaBooks

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.

  William Golding

  Life, Moving, Fall

  248 Copy quote

• 'A mother must put on her oxygen mask first, in order to be able to help her children' - I see this instruction on airplanes as an appropriate metaphor for feminist mothering. Mothers, empowered, are able to better care for and protect their children

  Andrea O'Reilly

  Mom, Mother, Children

  4 Copy quote

• One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now."

  John Green

  Girl, Real, Book

  4 Copy quote

• We live in a glass-soaked civilization, but as for the bird in the Chinese proverb who finds it so difficult to discover air, the substance is almost invisible to us. To use a metaphor drawn from glass, it may be revealing for us to re-focus, to stop looking through glass, and let our eyes dwell on it for a moment to contemplate its wonder.

  Alan Macfarlane

  Eye, Science, Civilization

  Alan MacFarlane, Gerry Martin (2011). “The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World”, p.4, Profile Books

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Jesus, Art, People

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Magic, Use

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Taken, Fighting

  9 Copy quote

• One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are...they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.

  Alan Lightman

  Phones, Cells, Somewhere Else

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.

  Donna Farhi

  Breathing, Way, Inevitable Change

  Donna Farhi (1996). “The Breathing Book: Good Health and Vitality Through Essential Breath Work”, p.5, Macmillan

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is a magical and inspiring metaphor through which adult readers will identify anger issues and discover practical methods to energize enduring change.

  Jeffrey K. Zeig

  Issues, Adults, Method

  4 Copy quote

• I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.

  Christopher Langan

  God, Religious, Believe

  46 Copy quote

• When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

  John Philpot Curran

  I Can

  4 Copy quote

• The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.

  Aberjhani

  Dancing, Halos, Vortex

  Aberjhani (2010). “The River of Winged Dreams (Hardcover Gift Edition)”, p.83, Lulu.com

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

  Cleanth Brooks

  Taken, Risk, Want

  9 Copy quote

• The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.

  Marion Woodman

  Body, May, Able

  Marion Woodman (1993). “Conscious Femininity: Interviews with Marion Woodman”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  Neil Postman

  Vegas, Messages, Television

  6 Copy quote

• You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

  Miguel Syjuco

  Memories, Cities, Shopping

  17 Copy quote

• An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Epithet, Degrade

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper: Including the Series Edited with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical”, p.141

  6 Copy quote

  Show source