Quotes About Metaphors

Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.

Like fish, when metaphors get old, they go bad," writes Christian poet Jeanne Murray Walker,9 and nowhere is that more apparent than among Christians on a Sunday morning.

Government entomologists and chemical company publicists freely employed metaphors that compared insects and Communists. At Columbia University in 1946, former British prime minister Winston Churchill suggested that Communists should study termites in order to see what their future had in store. Unintentionally clarifying the threatening metaphor, the president of the American Economic Entomologists entitled his 1947 speech "Totalitarian Insects.

Inaccurate similes and metaphors have the effect of deflecting the reader's attention from the story to the words on the page. Yet when carried off, especially when a simile is original and a metaphor sings, there is no greater glory in the practice of words.

Your sixth sense speaks to you in many ways—in symbols, pictures, metaphors, feelings, dreams, and even signs on the road. Your spirit has a language of its own, and the more freely you talk about your vibes, the more you come to know the language of your spirit.

The utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality (i.e. the maximization of utility), does not exist. Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of, or even consciously aware of, their reasoning. Most of their reason, besides, is based on various kinds of prototypes, framings, and metaphors. People seldom engage in a form of economic reason that could maximize utility.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

And it hits me, the reason for all the metaphors in recovery. Because the bald truth would be too terrifying. What she's saying is I may need an all-new career and all-new friends.

And it hits me, the reason for all the metaphors in recovery. Because the bald truth would too terrifying. What she's saying is I may need an all-new career and all-new friends. p 85

Strip away the metaphors, Jeannie had said, and you are left with the inexplicable. The supernatural. Only that's not possible. The supernatural may exist in books and movies, but not in the real world.

She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.

Many smart folks seem to think that if you just get your metaphors and messages right, you'll win. That if you start describing what you favor as a 'moral value' - 'affordable health care is a moral value' etc., - then you'll appeal to red-state voters.

Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality.

Taking the metaphors literally gives them a free pass to duck out of the real heavy lifting.

But in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power - 'knocking on the door', 'storming the citadel', 'smashing the glass ceiling', or just giving them a 'leg up' - underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.

Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it's God who's failed us!

Demons especially enjoy metaphors.

Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

One of those random acts of vandalism that metaphors commit now and then.

It's tempting to trivialize the power of metaphors. To each of the earlier examples, the natural response is to say, Well, of course the right metaphor is more useful. The other metaphor was wrong! Though that's a natural reaction, it's simplistic. The history of science isn't a series of switches from the wrong metaphor to the right one. It's a series of changes from worse metaphors to better ones, from less inclusive to more inclusive, from suggestive in one area to suggestive in another.

innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

Day-to-day political debates are also contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames, and the frames are fixed in the neural structures of [their] brains. In George W. Bush's first term, for example, he promised tax relief, which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain.