Quotes About Metaphor

O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being the freshest modern instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?

He once called her his basil plant;* and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains.

In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.

three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

A third position has been called strong Al. When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program.

The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical.

Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious. Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative. Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

Here we find a power of metaphor that we have not previously discussed, the power of revelation. This is the power that metaphor has to reveal comprehensive hidden meanings to us, to allow us to find meanings be- yond the surface, to interpret texts as wholes, and to make sense of patterns of events.

What we are concerned to provide throughout this book is in- stead a prerequisite to any such discussion, namely, a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the role of metaphor in the way we understand a poem.

The entailments of this metaphorical mode of thought are quite considerable: Moral standards that change with time, or social situation, or ethnicity are a danger to the functioning of society. There is no such thing as progress in morality; what is and is not moral is fixed for all time, and any change of standards in the name of would-be moral progress is really an evil, a chipping away at our moral foundations, a tearing of our moral fabric, and so on.

The thousands of blacks who were either purged from the voting rolls or falsely told the polls had closed were seen by many conservatives as not having been disciplined enough to make sure they voted. Metaphor

This Strict Father interpretation of evolution can then be turned metaphorically into Social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in society; and then, via the metaphor of the Moral Order Is the Natural Order, the social survival of the fittest can be seen as moral.

Since most of our moral understanding comes, via metaphor, from a broad range of other domains of experience, and since we apply those metaphors to a number of different experiential domains, we should be wary of trying to compartmentalize ethics. The cross-domain mappings of the metaphors suggest the intricate web of connections that impose our moral ideas on other aspects of our lives, including considerations that are technical, scientific, political, aesthetic, religious, and social.

Why an education bill about school testing? Once the testing frame applies not just to students but also to schools, then schools can, metaphorically, fail—and be punished for failing by having their allowance cut. Less funding in turn makes it harder for the schools to improve, which leads to a cycle of failure and ultimately elimination for many public schools.

Metaphorically, tall buildings are people standing erect. As each [NY twin] tower fell, it became a body falling. We are not consciously aware of the metaphorical images, but they are part of the power and the horror we experience when we see them.

An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class.

Bad apple frame. Consider the saying "A bad apple spoils the barrel." The implication is that if you remove the bad apple or some small number of bad apples, the others will be fine. The rot is localized and will not spread. Rot here is a metaphor for immorality. In a case where there is immoral behavior, it points blame at one person or a few people—and not to any broader systemic immorality, an immoral policy, or an immoral culture. This

It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world.

It is important to realize that the Social Nurturance metaphor and the Moral Nurturance metaphor may sometimes contradict each other, even though they form a natural pairing. This occurs when you have to maintain social ties with people in your community who do not believe in or operate by the Moral Nurturance metaphor. Compromising with such people for the sake of maintaining social ties may require compromising on moral nurturance. M

An instruction to the disciple to notice that the moon lies above the steeple point is thus metaphorically an instruction to understand that the institution of the church is less important than the divine. Looking just at the church, without noticing its relation to the moon, would be a mistake; and focusing on the institution of the church, without concentrating on its relation to the divine, would be the wrong way to understand religious truth.

Thus, an instruction to see the moon as irregular, as asymmetrical, is an instruc- tion to see, metaphorically, that the essence of the divine, which the church is to serve and protect, is not the abstract, perfect, lifeless doctrine of the institution, but rather real, imperfect, vital beings.

Much of the academic world and academic institutions are run according to this metaphor, which is based on Strict Father morality. Intellectuals who accept this view of the academic world may be political liberals, but they are intimately acquainted with Strict Father morality and practice it in their everyday professional lives. Feminisms

What we have here is an image-mapping based on structure—in this case, struc- ture that is in part metaphorically imposed. When such a mapping exists between the structure of a sentence and the structure of the meaning or the image that the sentence conveys, the mapping is called "iconic.