Quotes About Metaphor

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

A labyrinth -- that's Joyce's metaphor, too. Somebody could write a good Ph.D. dissertation on the metaphor of the labyrinth in James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. We all regard the universe as a maze that we're running around in and trying to figure out.

Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology — aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics — suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable.

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

In fact, the emphasis on choice and creativity in existentialist-humanist psychology has an exact parallel in the two-hole experiment. Many physicists think the best metaphor to describe that experiment is to say that we create the wave or particle depending on which experimental set-up we choose.

And there are, findable by me, four and only four theories in philosophy about the relationship of mind and matter: 1.Mind is an epiphenomenon of matter. 2.Matter is an epiphenomenon of mind. 3.Mind and matter are both equally real, but separate, and work in predetermined harmony with each other. 4.Mind and matter are human metaphors.

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind, modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth. Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it. Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor

So there we are. Aldous Huxley, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. John Lilly, philosopher Alan Watts and several other recent theorists have used this metaphor and this argument, usually without knowing that they were echoing Aleister Crowley.

Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like the leaf and the average — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.

Life is mostly metaphor.

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.

Door in the Dark: In going from room to room in the dark, I reached out blindly to save my face, But neglected, however lightly, to lace My fingers and close my arms in an arc. A slim door got in past my guard, And hit me a blow in the head so hard I had my native simile jarred. So people and things don't pair any more With what they used to pair with before.

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

You can't eat [literature], that's the problem, he said. I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.

And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).

Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can. And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

What they were glossing over with this too-convenient metaphor was that life itself was just a long series of trigger events.

I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel.

Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.