Quotes About Metaphor

This is what metaphor is. It is not saying that an ant is an elephant. Perhaps; both are alive. No. Metaphor is saying the ant is an elephant. Now, logically speaking, I know there is a difference. If you put elephants and ants before me, I believe that every time I will correctly identify the elephant and the ant. So metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.

King in Crimson is actually an alchemical term. King Crimson is a metaphor for Devil or Satan, but at the same time it's also a metaphor for one of the statures in the purification of man and the purification of mankind soul towards union with God and with Infinite, which is the philosophical aim of alchemists.

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.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Flower was a good metaphor for growth. The song is obviously about sexual responsibility, so that was the main metaphor. Also, it's like knowing who someone has been and remembering and appreciating that, but really appreciating what they are now even more.

Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the results. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed.

I've been writing for decades that balance is an inapt metaphor as it necessarily entails tradeoffs.

I think the labyrinth is an interesting metaphor for our lives as musicians. We're always being drawn toward the center of it because that's where the mystery is. What is music? It's a journey.

Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.

The engine room really is a metaphor for my head, and all the things bangin' around, and I think I share that with a lot of people. A lot of memories, and a lot of hopes, and a lot of just dealing with the day-to-day. Sometimes it gets all abstract.

The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.

I love sports. Anytime I can combine sports with a film I'm a happy guy. It's such a natural fit, because sports always seems to be a metaphor for life. Always, always, always.

Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that's been our unifying cry: "More light." Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlight. Neon. Incandescent. Lights that banish the darkness from our caves, to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier's field. Little tiny flashlight for those books we read under the covers when we're supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor... Light is knowledge. Light is life. Light is light.

It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

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

Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words.

Sci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it's more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.

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.

Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that.

A system of metaphor (pointing to a higher power) that one takes inside oneself as the truth and through its rules one aligns ones inner and outer behavior, submitting ones ego or will to the will of a higher power.

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.

The point of view foreigners will have of the film The Conquest isn't the same as the French public. What will interest American and international audiences is the love story between Nicolas and Cecelia that's a metaphor of today's occidental couple, namely the women in the shadows who carry their husbands into the spotlight, but the man is so absorbed with work so the woman leaves him for another man.

Your music can be played easily and well by any half-stringed harper or fumble-fingered idiot. Not that I'm maligning your songs. It's just that they're an entirely different kettle of fish-to use a seamanly metaphor-to Domick's. Don't you judge your songs against his standard! More people have already listened to your melodies and liked them than will ever hear Domick's, much less like them.

Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms. When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property-such as a Town Park-and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care of the affection of a thing which is his own.

The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. The strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it's correct, would be playing out the score of the universe.

I think the central metaphor of the movie is this notion of what the advertising industry does. In order to make someone want to buy something, they first have to make them feel bad about who they are in order to sell them that thing which will make them whole again, and happy again.

The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.

Metaphorically I am made of chairs. It's a metaphor though. That means I am not actually made of the chairs.

Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies... and often dangerous ones. Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves into sync with it, and thereby change the world itself. The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight. Soon, a person's situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.

When you talk about "infertility" you're already using a land-based metaphor - a woman's body compared to property, to be considered fruitful or barren. And "estate" encompasses both legacy and landscape. Think of Emerson, referring to his son's death as "the loss of a beautiful estate."

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.

Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.

I was really interested in this ability for others to create virtual memories for us. In "The Cartographers" I explore this through Adam Woods, and the company he works for, which produces virtual memories that people can beam into their consciousness. While the technology is sci-fi, the story is also a metaphor for the way love relationships create memories in our minds.

Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

You can't completely control the sport - Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature's own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.

Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.

As a child I always loved traditional Korean masked dances. There is something magical about a mask because we all wear or hide behind a metaphoric mask, and ultimately underneath this metaphor is our true vulnerable core. I think we all want to reveal ourselves but can only do so when we feel we are safe.

This force is unlimited. It is always moving and always flowing. The ancient Hawaiians, the Kahunas, used the metaphor of the flow of a running stream to represent the divine force.