Quotes About Metaphors

who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long.

Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it's our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is.

I also said, men are like curling irons, they never get out of your hair. And they are like government bonds, they take so long to mature.

I'm interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire

I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

Walt Kelly was much more interested in allegory and politics, and I'm much more interested in metaphors and myth.

theology requires metaphors and concepts that come from our understanding of nature and therefore from science.

When you write it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoin daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers

Ham-it-up managers like Gene make metaphors come to life and walk corporate hallways like an army of cheerful, highly motivated zombies. These vampires drain their employees of the ability to think for themselves by labeling critical comments as evidence of a bad attitude. They are also likely to withhold controversial information for fear of demotivating people.

If we speak plainly, without metaphors or symbols, we cannot escape common sense. Metaphors and symbols can be abused.

Lil Wayne, that was one of my main influences, music-wise, because of his wordplay and metaphors.

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

If you add up all the promises any politician makes, the math doesn't work. Hillary Clinton's math doesn't work; Donald's math probably doesn't work. I think you have to listen to their campaign pitches more as symbolic, more as metaphors.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

The Bible offers three metaphors that teach us God's view of life: Life is a test, life is a trust, and life is a temporary assignment. These ideas are the foundation of purpose-driven living.

metaphors themselves are time-bound and ideologically motivated.

Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.

Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely.

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations--and thus their analogies and metaphors--out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.