Metaphors Quotes

… shining city upon a hill

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

Lil Wayne, that was one of my main influences, music-wise, because of his wordplay and metaphors.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

NASA is my favorite website. The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

I am rather partial to Shakespeare, though I haven't done loads. But when it's done right, there's nothing like it. There are layers upon layers upon layers, and you unpack new things constantly. I don't know how he knew so many things - about the world, about women, about human nature, life, death, our fears and hopes.

Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

What would you think of me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

I have now the Treasurer’s head in a bag.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

What inspires me about rap is that it's written in an almost poetic way. I just think it's so cool.

We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.

The hardest portion of English, I must say it: Idioms.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

They are big fish in a small pond.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

People love stories; they use stories to make sense of the world.

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.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.