Quotes About Metaphor

To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean.

Faith isn't an act of intelligence, it's an act of imagination. Every time you give them a new metaphor, a mustard seed, a field, a garden, a vineyard, it's like pointing something out to a cat - the cat looks at your finger, not at what you're pointing at. They don't need to understand it, they only need to believe, and they do. They imagine the kingdom as they need it to be, they don't need to grasp it, it's there already, they can let it be. Imagination, not intellect.

Angels are just pretty insects.

Blue is beauty, not truth. "True blue" is a ruse, a rhyme; it's there, then it's not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color. Even deep blue is shallow. Blue is glory and power, a wave, a particle, a vibration, a resonance, a spirit, a passion, a memory, a vanity, a metaphor, a dream. Blue is a simile. Blue, she is like a woman.

Every time you give them a new metaphor for the kingdom they see the metaphor, a mustard seed, a field, a garden, a vineyard, it's like pointing something out to a cat - the cat looks at your finger, not at what you're pointing at.

y más pálido que la Muerte follándose un muñeco de nieve.

not watering the ground with the sap of men's limbs.

She felt something inside her turn to stone and fall down into her gut, where it lay cold and hard and uncomfortable. Which was impossible, of course. Human organs did not turn to stone and certainly could not shift into the stomach.

I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.

But metaphors set up not only similarities but also oppositions. A cup and a shield are alike in their form (round and concave), but opposite in their function (peace vs. war), just as Ares and Dionysus are alike insofar as they are gods, but opposite with regard to the ends they pursue and to the instruments they use.

metaphor is not only a means of delight but also, and above all, a tool of cognition...

the more openly it remains a figure of speech, the more it is a dissimilar similitude and not literal, the more a metaphor reveals its truth.

There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor.

those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks

formal semantics has sought to expand a logic of truth conditions so as to recognize the legitimacy of metaphorical expressions - expressions that speak about the world by lying.

through witty riddles and unsuspected metaphors, though ti tells us things differently to the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just as things are, and I dint know it.

Learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn our through use and ostentation.

Metaphors can be read according to multiple interpretations; yet these interpretations can be more or less legitimated on the grounds of an underlying encyclopedic competence.

Trees in the north die lying down – like people.

The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom...How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.

To make yourself beautiful you oiled your body with honey, enchanting the bees.

Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he

Argot is nothing more nor less than a wardrobe in which language, having some bad deed to do, disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and metaphoric rags.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.