Metaphor Quotes

Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.

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

The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.

You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.

A creed is an ossified metaphor.

Metaphors convince at once or not at all.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

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.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory

I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

If funkytown was a trailerpark, this guy would be a double-wide.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.

...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)

She's all over us like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with one pickpocket yesterday.

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

But it was like a dance across a field strewn with razors, and I bled with every step I took.

I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.

Frankenstein can be a metaphor for abandonment, or wanting to be accepted for who you are, or not liking who you are and wanting to actually change that.

Right now, I'm standing behind the glass, and I guess that's a metaphor for how my life will be going forward.

They see me as a symbol, and not a human being. That way they can kill me, say it’s not murder it’s a metaphor.

A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

The vampire is an outsider. He's the perfect metaphor for those things. He's someone who looks human and sounds human, but is not human, so he's always on the margins.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

Basketball really is a metaphor for life - the intangible skills I have learned on the court, have helped shape the person I am today.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads arteries and so forth.

Boxing remains an important living metaphor of the struggle for equality.

I still think that there's some kind of psychological investment in black athletes carrying the flag for "us" at times. So, sports [remains a] metaphor for struggle and triumph and flair.

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.

Football is a metaphor for the kind of country we want to create. It's based on merit.