Quotes About Metaphors

Instinct is still important, but now I can easily identify problems like cliches and mixed metaphors, and I have a broader palette to work off of.

The church is holy, set aside for God's purposes, and yet it is ordinary, subject to human ends. It is not that our metaphors and ideals are false but that we fail to realize that the church functions as an emotional system.

Cinema is a visual language, and you're always looking for visual metaphors for things. You know, if I was writing a play about Howard Hughes, I could have him give a monologue about how he's terrified to touch a doorknob. But on screen, you know, working with Marty Scorsese in 'The Aviator,' that became the series of images that told a story.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. …

The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.

she'd say there must be something in Leviticus against mixing so many metaphors.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

Religion is a huge part of our consciousness. I grew up in the Bible Belt, so it's our mythology. Those are the stories we learn as little kids at Sunday school. I'm not afraid to use the metaphors, because I think the stories are beautiful.

Fall in love and stay in love. Explode. Don't intellectualize. Get passionate about ideas. Cram your head full of images. Stay in the library. Stay off the internet and all that crap. Read all the great books. Read all the great poetry. See all the great films. Fill your life with metaphors. And then explode.

truth" as an "army of metaphors." By that he meant that truth is not a given, but it is an elusive, contested act of interpretation that emerges and makes claims through many twists and turns.

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.

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.

If our bodies were different, though, our metaphors would be different, as Olaf Stapledon showed in Star Maker. Crabs walk sideways, for instance. If crabs could talk, they would undoubtedly describe progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express the hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them. Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.

Why should jokes and metaphors give such pleasure? Because we can't stand very much ambiguity. Cognitive dissonance makes us uneasy, and for good reason-survival depends on making the world as predictable as possible. So when we figure something out, when we impose order on what seems chaotic, we heave a psychological sigh of relief.

Red Barber announces the Dodger games and he uses those expressions—picked them up down South…. "Tearing up the pea patch" means going on a rampage; "sitting in the catbird seat" means sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him.

For somewhere," said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, "there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!

I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.

This will be our ultimate act of creativity: to create the capability of being creative. A nonbiological neocortex will ultimately be faster and could rapidly search for the kinds of metaphors that inspired Darwin and Einstein.

I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.

Men's bodies are weapons and women's bodies are targets and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.

Many people assume that leaving a cult like the Brethren must be exhilarating. 'You had no TV or pop music or cinema,' they say, 'and then you did? It must have been amazing!' But when you see interviews with people who have recently left cults, they describe feeling bewildered and frightened; their eyes dart around, searching for points of reference, metaphors that would get somewhere close to describing the feeling of being lost, not-at-home, without walls.

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.