Quotes About Metaphor

If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like

I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

If atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel and bald is a hair colour.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

When religion stops talking about animals it will be all downhill.

The old harlot, German philosophy, has finally turned into a church lady.

When Jesus said "Whoever eats my flesh & drinks my blood has eternal life" John 6:54 He was CLEARLY talking to Zombies & Vampires

A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk.

Blossoming and unfolding are basically the same thing, but blossoming is more romantic.

Love is also like a coconut which is good while it is fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what's left tastes bitter.

Catch more flies with honey . . . although I'd never quite understood the value of the expression. Mother had used it all the time while we were growing up and even as a child, I'd questioned why anybody would want to catch flies unless you were a goblin and used them for croutons. Linda

already she drew in the sand with her big toe: King Solomon, as though he were a rubber ball, an apocalyptic, bearded herring, an imperial walking-stick, an amalgam, half chicken and half Solomon.

How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring?

The sport assassin: You know I use it as a metaphor, not to cause any problems. You have to have that part of your personality. I've always joked that Peyton is a nice guy and comes off as a nice guy. And if the situation on the field is, yeah, really nice guy but then you walk away and you're dripping blood, like you don't know how it happened, like the knife is so sharp, because he's that kind of a guy; over my dead body is this not going to go down this way.

Doesn't it seem as though her heart were a green flame? Perhaps it's the cold green heart of a small green snake, with a minute flaw in it, the kind of small green snake that slithers from branch to branch in the jungle, passing itself off as a vine. What's more, perhaps when she gave me the ring with such a gentle, loving expression, she wanted me to draw such a meaning from it some day.

Blood and flowers were alike, Isao thought, in that both were quick to dry up, quick to change their substance. And precisely because of this, then, blood and flowers could go on living by taking on the substance of glory. Glory in all its form was inevitably something metallic.

For ideas are, in the long run, essentially foreign to human existence; and the body — receptacle of the involuntary muscles, of the internal organs and circulatory system over which it has no control — is foreign to the spirit, so that it is even possible for people to use the body as a metaphor for ideas, both being something quite alien to human existence as such.

A dead body reminds me a bit of a bottle of whisky. If you drop the bottle and it cracks, what's inside pours out. It's only natural.

To follow its shadow, to remain forever within it, she herself would have to become the sea. And at that moment, in a single great surge, she did.

Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor.

Puede sufrir en verdad una nación? ¿Tiene una nación ojos, manos, sentidos, afectos y pasiones? Si se la pincha, ¿sangrará? Claro que no. Si es vencida en la guerra, pierde una provincia o incluso renuncia a su independencia, pero no puede experimentar dolor, tristeza ni ningún otro tipo de desgracia porque no tiene cuerpo, ni mente, ni ningún tipo de sentimiento. Lo cierto es que se trata solamente de una metáfora.

Indeed, religions might be seen as elaborate, multilayered metaphors, with layers upon layers of submetaphors, constructions that point beyond themselves toward the primary experience of ultimate reality but do not capture it.