Quotes About Metaphors

You should never denigrate the form in which your perceptions arise, never think yourself less-than, if you do not use scientific metaphors. Each of us must reclaim our ability to know the world directly, deeply and well. (Any feeling of less-than is merely a symptom of the colonization of your mind.) Don't leave it in the hands of experts. That is how we got into this mess in the first place.

There were lots of ominous sports metaphors in the fragmentary intercept reports. The score was going to be 200 to nothing. The Olympics were coming.18

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Tomas ne savait pas, alors, que les métaphores sont une chose dangereuse. On ne badine pas avec les métaphores. L'amour peut naître d'une seule métaphore.

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

Tomás no se daba cuenta en aquella ocasión de que las metáforas son peligrosas. Con las metáforas no se juega. El amor puede surgir de una sola metáfora.

Tomas ne comprenait pas alors que les métaphores sont une chose dangereuse. On ne badine pas avec les métaphores. L'amour peut naître d'une seule métaphore.

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

With its clotted jargon, circular reasoning, and smug, debunking cynicism, poststructuralism works only on narrative—on the longer genres of story and novel. It is helpless with lyric poems, where the individual word has enormous power and mystery and where the senses are played upon by rhythm, mood, and dreamlike metaphors.

What I've done here this evening is just create a string of metaphors to try and pique your interest. Not once did I do justice to the truth of the situation or the depth of the psychedelic experience, because it cannot be told. It cannot be told. My technique is to tell the wildest, strangest story I can think of, claim that's the psychedelic experience, and leave it at that. But you should all know that the journey begins where the words stop.

Conceptual metaphors generally 'outlive' the specific words and expressions that involve them.

If we know how metaphors work on a conceptual level, we can control their effects. We can avoid using metaphors that are confusing or distracting, and we can design metaphors that do exactly what we want. When we encounter metaphoric language, we can analyse what makes it effective or not. We can avoid being manipulated by subconscious metaphors, and we can accept the benefits of a metaphor while rejecting any aspects we find unhelpful or inaccurate.

Mixed metaphors with two source domains that don't make sense together, […] are the structures that most deserve the name 'mixed metaphors'.

Whether metaphors are strung together like separate beads on a string, or kneaded together into a compound, it's important that we can use more than one of them.

The fact that metaphors can sleep and wake is both bad news and good news for speakers and writers who want to avoid mixed metaphors. The bad news is that when a metaphoric word or phrase is sleeping for us, we probably won't notice if we use the word or phrase in ways that are inconsistent with its source-domain meaning.

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson vividly illustrate in their 1980 classic, Metaphors We Live By, orientational metaphors such as 'good is up' and 'good is forward' are deeply embedded in Western culture, shaping the way we think and speak.

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it's trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things.

Stories and metaphors are compelling ways to communicate information and change attitudes and behavior.

My fans have always loved my metaphors.

Hip-hop is not all '2 Chainz' - although '2 Chainz' is awesome. How he does that with metaphors, I don't know.

My husband was 50; I was in my late 30s. We had lived adulthoods that did not include infants, except as metaphors. And then, like so many in today's America, we had a baby in later life.

That's what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

The task, and the joy, of writing for me is that I can play with the metaphors that God has placed in the world and present them to others in a way they will accept. My goal is to allow readers their own experience of whatever discovery I have made, so that it feels new to them, but also familiar, in that it is of a piece with their own experience. It is a form of serious play.

You always come up with such flattering metaphors. The last time we had one of our little talks, you compared me to a cactus.