Quotes About Metaphor

Confucius say: "Baseball wrong — man with four balls cannot walk."

Bees that have honey in their mouths have stings in their tails.

The ancients did well when they typified the soul as a butterfly!

Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle for units of nourishing combustion...

Spring blossoms are fairy tales, autumn leaves are tragic dramas.

Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone, and more fragile than a rose.

If Monday is a mosquito and Wednesday is a camel, then Friday is a unicorn!

Screw up the vise as tightly as possible — you have rheumatism; give it another turn, and that is gout.

The gout is to the stomach, what rheumatism is to the heart.

The Vine of Life grows a single melon. The color of the heart is unknown until the rind is split.

But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.

Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it—which always amounts to the same.

her music; its unmatched poetic shape and impact, which, like metaphor in language, breaks out of its own restrictions and — with vast imaginal inference and resonance — expresses for us things yet unknown.

A thimble might be a kiss, a flower might be a name, and a dragon might be a ship

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish

That moving carcass does but very inadequately symbolizes you....a subtle and immortal spirit.

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: "You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes."3

When the Dragons belch, all Hong Kong defecates.

My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

The doctor I would want for myself or for anyone else I cared about would be one who understands that disease is more than just a clinical entity; it is an experience and a metaphor, with a message that must be listened to.

Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.

Taking the Bible too literally is a mistake. It should be read as a guidebook of wisdom and insight.