Quotes About Metaphor

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.

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

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

I think that as poets, we can get away with stuff because we can ride on the melt of metaphor. We cover a lot of terrain psychically and temporally and linguistically via metaphor, and that can be a stand-in for an argument, whereas in prose, you have to make the argument, and you have to be convincing because the sequence must make sense in time and purpose.

I always thought that's the exact metaphor, the perfect metaphor for acting. To go blind, to ignore the danger, and to totally trust.

You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.

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.

Football became my obvious metaphor as it does for many, and I began to equate this as being 'halftime' in my life. As I reflected on my professional life I realized how much time I had spent trying to make first downs and score touchdowns. My focus had now changed into trying to be more about people and serving others.

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... spreading DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. ... It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.

Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.

The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It's a metaphor. It's not about anything.

The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.

The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.

The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

I think that we give the impression, to carry on your metaphor, that we go a little faster than we actually do. I'm fairly lazy so I'm always interested in slowing down.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

I think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato or a piece of meat. You have to kind of have a look at the potato or the piece of meat and see what kind of possibilities are in the ingredient. I know I'm using the wrong metaphor. I think my job is to see what potato is there and from there, just work under their conditions.

Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

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.

I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.

The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.

I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.

Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

With a horror movie, you're making a metaphor. You're making a personalized nightmare for the protagonist.

Ask yourself... If my body were a metaphor for my life, what would the message be?

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness. There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance of being awake, of not falling back to sleep.

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.

We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the old metaphor: You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.