Quotes About Metaphor

I was looking at this tree but it was a dragon and then a tree

It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

The pen is mightier than the sword, if you shoot that pen out of a gun

Finally, though, she had to admit a penis was silly, mostly hiding, like a diphthong in a sentence you had to work too hard to figure out.

Money is to Everything as an Aeroplane is to Australia. The aeroplane isn't Australia, but it remains the only practical way we know of reaching it. So perhaps, metonymically, the aeroplane is Australia after all.

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.

Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.

Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.

On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don't know if it's true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.

He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

Cat can have kittens in the oven, girl, but that won't ever make em muffins.

A good simile,--as concise as a king's declaration of love.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

Love is a crocodile just above the water line waiting to attack the innocent herbivore of my freedom.

His stomach, a packed elevator, began a slow descent toward his feet.

he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

life is a journey," the metaphor guides you to some conclusions: You should learn the terrain, pick a direction, find some good traveling companions, and enjoy the trip, because there may be nothing at the end of the road.

The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong.

An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.

Whatever its origins, it's a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson's account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there's more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.