Quotes About Metaphors

Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes.

While we like to think that our theology shapes our understanding of the world, our understanding of the world often shapes our theology. The central metaphors of an era will often shift our notions of God.

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

The reason I keep making so many musical metaphors with 'Luke Cage' is that I don't view it as much a television show as I do a concept album with dialogue.

Whenever American farmers leave their plows en masse and race threateningly after the regular politicians they are called wild jackasses, or worse. An agrarian tide is said to be rising, or a fire sweeping the prairies, or a farm rebellion in progress. Mixing of the burning and flowing and rebelling metaphors is hard to avoid...The hoofprints of the wild jackasses are on our democracy, and its configuration is the better for them.

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.

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

True poetry is composed of metaphors and symbols which are born in the heart, rise like clouds, and assume a celestial form; verses formed otherwise are not poetry, but only artificial words, each of which contradicts the feelings inside. The utterances and words that have not been formed in a person's soul as the voice of conscience are all hollow, no matter how embellished they are or how dazzling they seem to be.

God's process of revelation required that he condescend to us, that he accommodate our humanity, that he express himself in familiar language and metaphors. It should be no surprise then that many of the common elements of the culture of the day were adopted, at times adapted, at times totally converted or transformed, but nevertheless used to accomplish God's purposes.

She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it. from "She Does Not Love You

You must know that it is very injurious to begin with this branch of philosophy, viz., Metaphysics; or to explain [at first] the sense of the similes occurring in prophecies, and interpret the metaphors which are employed in historical accounts and which abound in the writings of the Prophets.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.

Man, as a purely natural creature, fairly educated, but wholly unspiritualized, is a mental composition of: Hunger, Curiosity, Self-Esteem, Avarice, Cowardice, Lust, Cruelty, Personal Ambition; and on these vile qualities alone our 'society' hangs together; the virtues have no place anywhere, and do not count at all, save as conveniently pious metaphors.

El pasado era ése [...] él creyendo que la vida iba a quedar allí, detenida en ese idilio injusto, uno junto al otro, defendidos quién sabe por qué, solos en la nube de humo y metáforas cochinas

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.

Look, dudes, we didn't come this far down the rabbit hole to stop on the one-yard line in the middle of like Nazi headquarters," said Nick. "Did we?" "No, but if you tried, you could probably mix a few more metaphors," said Elise.

Missiologist and bishop Lesslie Newbigin uses a cluster of metaphors to describe the church as a "sign, foretaste, and instrument" of the reign of God.' If that great eschatological, multicultural congregation of Revelation is one image of God's reign, in what ways might each current congregation be a sign that points to this reality?

Monotheistic Yahwism resembled neither a Greek philosophical notion of Deity as nonsexual Being nor some type of divine bisexuality. Instead, Israelite society perceived Yahweh primarily as a god, embodying traits or values expressed by gendered metaphors yet transcending such particular renderings. It is unnecessary and it is not supported by any biblical text to argue that monotheistic Yahweh involved either androgyny or homoeroticism

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

It' hard to explain depression to people who haven't suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren't there. You have to resort to metaphors.

Complexity writings are filled with metaphors that try to make complex phenomena understandable to the human brain's hardwired need for order, meaning, patterns, sense making, and control, ever feeding our illusion that we know what's going on. We often don't. But the pretense that we do is comforting—and sometimes necessary for some effort at action.

And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them....