Conceptual Mapping Quotes

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

Magnitudes are algebraically represented by letter, men by men of letters, and so on.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

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

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

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.

Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

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.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new and complex things in relation to the things we already know... once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.