Quotes About Metaphor

But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas. The

One might say that, for Stendhal, it is the uncertainty of the metaphor of love – of whether the beloved will become in her turn a lover – that keeps the lover interested. If he becomes certain of her love for him, he might well become blasé. Without doubt, without constant vacillation and uncertainty orchestrated by the woman's sudden moods and fits of bad temper, the lover would become complacent and lose his passion.

Her eyes] were like two perfect emeralds stuck in the middle of a large sausage pizza.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his "panopticon" in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.

If only they had told us that it was all metaphor, I might have learned;

The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales' concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.

For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.

Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?

Now would all the waves were women, then I'd drown, and chassée with them evermore!

there is a delicacy in it equalled only by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk.

And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.

Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!

that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea, said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

Bence gölgem olduÄŸu söylenen ÅŸey benim esas varl???m. Bence manevi ÅŸeylere bak???m?z denizin içinden güneÅŸe bakan ve üzerlerindeki kal?n su tabakas?n?n yaln?zca bir hava tabakas? olduÄŸunu düÅŸünen istiridyeler gibi.

There's a metaphor Vincent Eades likes to use: If you examine a butterfly according to the laws of aerodynamics, it shouldn't be able to fly. But the butterfly doesn't know that, so it flies.

It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.

Maybe when water yearned for fire / it invented waves / so one day they might become flames

I do genuinely believe that young people who play sport at a competitive level, sensibly controlled, sensibly organised, that has to be a good thing. It will teach them to win, it will teach them to lose with dignity and magnanimity - all the things you want. It's a pretty good metaphor for life.

Superhero movies are so famous because of the metaphor that they trigger in one's self about who you could be if things were different.

The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.

That's the secret of 'True Blood' - all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can't have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.

Back in the 1980s, state-of-the-nation fictions were all set in Manhattan. Now, they're all in Trump country. Early in 'S-Town,' we're introduced to an actual maze, every branch of which leads to a further junction. This may also be a metaphor.