Metaphor Quotes - Page 14

• 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.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  War, Stupid, Wife

  Theodore Dalrymple (2005). “Our Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses”, Ivan R Dee

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• You are not made of metaphors,
  Not apologies, not excuses.

  Sarah Kay

  Apology, Excuse, Made

  Sarah Kay (2016). “The Type”, p.13, Hachette UK

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• Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.

  R. S. Thomas

  Two, Giving, Imagination

  "Selected Prose" by R. S. Thomas, (p. 131), 1995.

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• Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

  Amy Waldman

  Religious, Emotional, Community

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• Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.

  Robert Grudin

  Time, Art, Students

  Robert Grudin (1997). “Time and the Art of Living”, p.2, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.

  Edward Tufte

  Design, Maps, Information

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• Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Mirrors, Cells

  Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, p.388, Simon and Schuster

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• Metaphor is embodied in language.

  Dennis Potter

  Language

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• Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors.

  Rumi

  Fall, Tree, Together

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• There, at the centre, are the artists who really form the consciousness of their time; they respond deeply, intuitively to what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen, and their response is expressed in metaphor, in image and in fable.

  John Wain

  Artist, Theatre, Fables

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• 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.

  Jennifer Beals

  Thinking, Order, Doe

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• The Bible offers three metaphors that teach us God's view of life: Life is a test, life is a trust, and life is a temporary assignment.

  Rick Warren

  Christian, Views, Religion

  Rick Warren (2011). “What on Earth Am I Here For? Purpose Driven Life”, p.26, Harper Collins

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• "Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.

  Larry Wall

  Wisdom, Omniscience, Lurking

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• It's frightening and exhilarating. It's like combat. Look at the metaphors: You kill when it works; you die when it doesn't.

  Robin Williams

  Looks, Comedy, Combat

  "RD Interview: Robin Williams, in His Own Words". Interview with Andy Simmons, www.rd.com. 2006.

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• Web media needs to move to TV metaphor - with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads.

  Nick Denton

  Moving, Media, Needs

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• I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests.

  Noah Cicero

  Feet, Guitar, Bird

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• A Witch's work is mind work and utilizes powerful metaphors, allegories, and images that unlock the powers of the mind.

  Laurie Cabot

  Powerful, Mind, Witch

  Laurie Cabot (2013). “Power of the Witch: The Earth, the Moon, and the Magical Path to Enlightenment”, p.16, Delta

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• Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth, and these are two kinds of generic givens of life, if you look at it poetically, biblically, the idea of the life of beings, of man, being transitory, the earth abides-ashes to ashes, dust to dust-man returns to earth, grows out of earth like a flower, wilts, goes back to the earth... We are frail, transitory creatures with aspirations of immortality, conscious of our inevitable death, and we have to deal with it somehow.

  Stephen De Staebler

  Flower, Men, Dust

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• In the story shoes are just a metaphor for what these girls go through...the grass is always greener and everyone always wants to be in somebody else's shoes; they don't want to be in their own.

  Cameron Diaz

  Girl, Shoes, Want

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• That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.

  Kelly Corrigan

  Meaningful, Sometimes, Violent

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• The New Religion will manifest, for instance, through organizations like Masonry. In Freemasonry is embedded the core or the secret heart of the occult mysteries, wrapped up on number, metaphor and symbol.

  Benjamin Creme

  Heart, Organization, Numbers

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• PRETTY LITTLE LIARS works as a metaphor for our central human experience: we have no way to objectively know about anything, no way to move forward with certainty, and yet move forward we must. We stumble through life, trying to find our own way, not knowing whom to listen to, whom to trust, whom to suspect, what to believe. But in that process we discover our most authentic selves.

  Norman Buckley

  Liars, Believe, Moving

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• With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement.

  Kwame Dawes

  Book, Writing, America

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• Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.

  James Richardson

  Teacher, Book, New Experiences

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• 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.

  Richard Dawkins

  Rain, Character, Garden

  "The Blind Watchmaker". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1986.

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