George Lakoff Quotes

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

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

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate and learn, discover and invent.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

Language is memory and metaphor.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

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

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true.

If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are