Metaphor Quotes - Page 30

• We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

  John Searle

  Umpires, Car, Understanding

  "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.

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• I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

  Alan Garner

  Coward, Cop, Used

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• Football is a metaphor for the kind of country we want to create. It's based on merit.

  Jack Kemp

  Football, Country, Want

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• Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way…Tradition would say I was a 'child of Mars.'

  James Hillman

  Children, Military, Book

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• Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate and learn, discover and invent.

  James Geary

  Thinking, Secret, Essentials

  "Metaphorically speaking". TEDGlobal Talk, www.ted.com. July 2009.

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• The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

  Derek Walcott

  Shadow

  " White Egrets by Derek Walcott" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2010.

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• SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.

  M. John Harrison

  Fun, Opportunity, Imagination

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• The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

  Martin Gardner

  Book, Levels, Lasts

  Introduction to "The Annotated Alice. The Definitive Edition" by Lewis Carroll, 1999.

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• A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.

  Lorna Dee Cervantes

  Men, May, Whole Life

  Francisco X. Alarcón, Lorna Dee Cervantes (1989). “Chicanas Y Chicanos en Diálogo”

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• But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Way, Mathematics, Using Me

  Scarlett Thomas (2008). “The End Of Mr. Y”, p.26, Canongate Books

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• I used the physical scar of my breast cancer operation, the scar that I have across my chest as a metaphor for all kinds of scars.

  Carly Simon

  Cancer, Scar, Kind

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• It's not necessarily a church theme and it's not really about church. I like my album themes to be metaphors because it gives me the freedom to speak about something else that's going on in my life, so the Born Sinner thing is not about church, it's not even about religion. It's using that as canvas to get other messages across and that's what the album will be.

  J. Cole

  Giving, Church, Albums

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• I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.

  Seth Lloyd

  Program, Capacity, Explanation

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• I don’t know how you look at the inside of your head — what metaphor you choose — but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.

  James St. James

  Yawning, Drug, Looks

  James St. James (2003). “Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

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• What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.

  Louis Aragon

  Wine, Fire, Lazy

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• It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

  Northrop Frye

  Language, Surrender, Precision

  "The Great Code: The Bible and Literature". Book by Northrop Frye, 1981.

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• Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.

  Northrop Frye

  Men, World, Body

  "The Great Code: The Bible and Literature". Book by Northrop Frye, 1981.

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• Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.

  Northrop Frye

  Unity, Mind, Integration

  Northrop Frye, Alvin A. Lee (2006). “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature”, p.189, University of Toronto Press

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• This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church.

  John Calvin

  Son, Names, Church

  "Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians" by Jean Calvin, William Pringle, Edinburgh, (p. 218), 1854.

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• This is what metaphor is. It is not saying that an ant is an elephant. Perhaps; both are alive. No. Metaphor is saying the ant is an elephant. Now, logically speaking, I know there is a difference. If you put elephants and ants before me, I believe that every time I will correctly identify the elephant and the ant. So metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Believe, Intelligent, Elephants

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• The number one metaphor I have in my mind for writing a screenplay is that...you're trying to climb a mountain blindfolded. And the funny thing about that is, you think, 'Okay, that's hard because you're climbing up a rock face, and you don't know where you're going, and you don't know where the top is, you can't see what's below you...' But actually the hardest part about climbing a mountain blindfolded is just finding the mountain.

  Michael Arndt

  Writing, Thinking, Numbers

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• On several occasions, we are informed that the professional ideal 'took steps', 'organised assaults', and 'selected social problems'. But this is anthropomorphic metaphor implausibly masquerading as historical explanation.

  David Cannadine

  Book, Historical, Steps

  David Cannadine (1998). “History in Our Time”, Penguin Group USA

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• Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms. When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property-such as a Town Park-and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care of the affection of a thing which is his own.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Care, Politics

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.25, IHS Press

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• Jerusalem has been - and for many, still is - a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith.

  Amos Elon

  Cities, Giving, Atheism

  Amos Elon (1995). “Jerusalem, Battlegrounds of Memory”, Kodansha Globe

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• A creed is an ossified metaphor.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Atheism, Creeds, Positive Atheism

  Elbert Hubbard (1911). “A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard”

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