Metaphor Quotes

• Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the common place.

  

  Aristotle
  • Place
  • Common
  • Halfway

• I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

  

  Aharon Appelfeld
  • Writing
  • Metaphor
  • Catastrophe

• Lotus-land as it appears in 'Free Will' is simply a metaphor for an idealized background, a 'land of milk and honey.' It is sometimes also used as a pejorative name for Los Angeles, though that was not in my mind when I wrote it.

  

  Neil Peart Rush
  • Los Angeles
  • Metaphor
  • Honey

• The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.

  

  Adam Lashinsky
  • Metaphor
  • Cloud
  • Industries

• The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

  

  Steve Jobs
  • Metaphor
  • Device
  • Desktop

• Science fiction, in its purest form, for me, it works the best when it's being used as metaphor to look at something from a one-step-removed process, to give a little objectivity and insight into something that, if you were applying it on the face of it, we'd all be too close to.

  

  Noah Wyle
  • Process
  • Fiction
  • Metaphor

• I would say to those who don't like the metaphor This is reality.

  

  Eliot Spitzer
  • Reality
  • Metaphor

• The "wall of separation between church and State" is a metaphor based on bad history.

  

  William Rehnquist
  • Church
  • Wall
  • Separation

• It is permissible to be the god of your own metaphors.

  

  Rachel Hartman
  • God
  • Metaphor

• “Metaphors replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”

  

  Amos Tversky
  • Metaphor
  • Uncertainty
  • Cover up

• The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.

  

  Arturo Rosenblueth
  • Metaphor
  • Vigilance

• ...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

  

  Antonio Damasio
  • World
  • Mind
  • Light

• Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

  

  Anne Carson
  • Mind
  • Experience
  • Mistake

• For every album, I look at where I'm at in my career and think of a title that kind of represents that. And for me, 'Night Train' was kind of a metaphor for where things have gone, from being on one bus with 12 other guys, pulling a trailer my first few years on the road, to now. We're out here with six or seven buses and eight or nine semis.

  

  Jason Aldean
  • Career
  • Night
  • Road

• Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

  

  Rachel Hartman
  • Nature
  • Emotion
  • Awkward

• I was tied down in that chair for 10 minutes and experienced what it was like to be completely powerless while someone else has complete dominance. It's sadistic, even though I find Richard to be a really lovely human being. That's what the whole film "Tickled" is about. It's not a film about tickling, but I think tickling offers a really good visual metaphor for the much bigger ideas that we were trying to get at about power and control - by people who have a lot of money - over people without money and who have no power in the relationship.

  

  David Farrier
  • Power
  • Control
  • Relationship

• On the much revered family of North American mythology - and a metaphor for the Ruling Alliance: Sacred family! .... The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.

  

  August Strindberg
  • Children
  • Family
  • Home

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

  

  Robert Frost
  • World
  • Safe
  • Educated

• If there's a silver bullet in the battle to recapture Albany, it is the re-engagement of our citizens. This capital has become a physical metaphor for the isolation and alienation of our people.

  

  Andrew Cuomo
  • People
  • Battle
  • Engagement

• For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.

  

  Annia Ciezadlo
  • World
  • Men
  • Children

• The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.

  

  George Will
  • Language
  • Logic
  • Metaphor

• There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

  

  Anne Carson
  • Trying
  • English
  • Greek

• I like to make people dream and think and imagine and learn and study. Nowadays, music is so literal - it's telling you, "This is how it is," and my music's the opposite. I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know.

  

  Dawn Angelique
  • People
  • Thinking
  • Dream

• The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.

  

  Alicia Ostriker
  • Metaphor
  • Metaphysics
  • Poetics

1

2

3

4

5

6

previous

next