Metaphorical Quotes - Page 3

• By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.

  James Geary

  Thinking, Discovery, Together

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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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• Years later, I found myself running
  a network television division and then a
  movie studio and now an entire entertainment
  company. But, much of the success I've achieved
  can be traced to the direct and metaphorical
  lessons I learned in building those campfires.
  I can hardly think of an aspect of my life
  that wasn't positively affected by my camping
  experience.

  Michael Eisner

  Running, Thinking, Years

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• My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.

  Saul Bass

  Emotional, Stories, Way

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

  W. H. Auden

  Language, Humans, Human Language

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• Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

  John Fowles

  Sympathy, Reality, Historical

  John Fowles (1970). “The Aristos”, Signet Book

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• The fantastical images in my works are descriptive in a different way - a metaphorical way - that removes you from reality. Then, this visually removed point of view allows you to deal with a very heavy subject.

  Signe Baumane

  Reality, Views, Way

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• Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Motivation, Inspiration, Artist

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• When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

  Derrick Jensen

  Home, Talking, Important

  Derrick Jensen (2004). “A Language Older Than Words”, p.75, Chelsea Green Publishing

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• I played to win. When I was a child, my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians in the park, and I was always an Indian who got captured. That was a learning experience; they were showing me that as a woman I was going to be captured. But in a metaphorical sense, I think I did eventually become a cowboy.

  Ita Buttrose

  Education, Brother, Children

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• The economy is just a metaphorical device, it’s not real. That's why it's got the word con in it.

  Russell Brand

  Real, Economy, Devices

  Russell Brand (2014). “Revolution”, p.213, Ballantine Books

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• Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine's heady, gin is poisonous, vodka's cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I'm a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.

  Cate Marvin

  Real, Wine, Beer

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.

  Sam Keen

  Spiritual, Thinking, Always Trying

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Book, Careers, People

  "I Remain Fascinated by Memory". Interview with Michael Scott Moore and Michael Sontheimer, www.spiegel.de. October 5, 2005.

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• In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.

  Louis de Bernieres

  World, Stranger, Passing

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• If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Scientist, Precise

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• The differences between religions are only differences involving the pathways that lead toward the practice of directly experiencing higher levels of perception and understanding. All religions are paths to a metaphorical mountain-top variously named Wisdom, enlightenment, self-realization, the kingdom of heaven, righteousness, etc. Differences that lead to violence and persecution are based on a corrupted relationship to the teachings and practices of religion.

  Jacob Needleman

  Teaching, Heaven, Understanding

  Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com

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• What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.

  John Green

  Memories, Reality, Play

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• An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

  Steven Pinker

  Moon, Atoms, Ciphers

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• Golf is the art of driving hard, avoiding the rough, surmounting traps and hazards, aiming straight, and arriving on the green at last, only to end up in a hole in the ground before your companions. The favored pastime of businessmen and their cronies, probably without a full appreciation of its metaphorical implications.

  Rick Bayan

  Appreciation, Art, Golf

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• What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

  Naomi Klein

  Space, Kind, Absence

  Naomi Klein (2009). “No Logo”, p.64, Macmillan

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• I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

  David Byrne

  Song, Believe, Design

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• I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Jobs, Believe, Reality

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.185, Penguin

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• A metaphorical weight lifted from his allegorical chest and Artemis Fowl felt himself again.

  Eoin Colfer

  Weight, Fowl, Artemis

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• If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

  Peter Watts

  Believe, Heart, Odds

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