Metaphor Quotes - Page 19

• We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

  James Gleick

  Thinking, Flow, Time Passes

  James Gleick (2016). “Time Travel: A History”, p.129, Pantheon

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• Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.

  Karl Marlantes

  War, Vietnam, Abandoned

  "A Vietnam Epic Uncovers Old Wounds: An Interview with Karl Marlantes". Interview with Evan James, www.motherjones.com. April 30, 2010.

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• I started to think of Grace of Monaco as a metaphor for women in general.

  Olivier Dahan

  Thinking, Grace, Monaco

  "Olivier Dahan: 'I don't read the Grace of Monaco critics'". Interview with Andrew Pulver, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2014.

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• Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

  Charles Jencks

  Selfish, Book, Bangs

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• I explain at the parties that I believe knitting is a transformative and intriguing act that can change the life and brain of the person doing it, and that knitting is a perfect metaphor for life and insight into some better ways through it.

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Party, Believe, Knitting

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• Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them.

  Don Paterson

  Ideas, Two, People

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• I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

  George Steiner

  Art, Believe, Difficult Questions

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• People will listen to sophisticated physicists, using God as a kind of metaphor for the deep constants, the deep problems, the deep principles of physics, and say that in that sense I believe in God. The reaction is, "Oh, this great physicist believes in God - that means I'm free to believe in the trinity and in the crucifixion and in the reincarnation of Christ" - and all that stuff, which of course has nothing whatever to do with the fundamental constants of physics, which is what these physicists are talking about.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Mean, Talking

  "Faith and Reason" Interview, www.pbs.org.

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• When I was 40, I wrote my first book, The Pilgrimage, and I said to myself, "why did it take so long for me to write this book?" Because my dream, since I was 10 years old, was to be a writer. I said, I have to revisit my life using a metaphor, and the metaphor was basically this boy that has a dream and has to go far away to realize that his dream is close to him.

  Paulo Coelho

  Dream, Book, Writing

  "Interview with Paulo Coelho: best selling author of The Alchemist". Interview with Amina Chaudary, theislamicmonthly.com. November 3, 2014.

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• Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Time, Space, Causality

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1979). “Philosophy and truth: selections from Nietzsche's notebooks of the early 1870's”, Humanities Pr

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• Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Poetry, Algebra, Higher

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• truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Coins, Forgotten, Illusion

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• ... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Baby, Art, Sex

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• A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

  Mason Cooley

  Religion, Theology

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• 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.

  Johan Huizinga

  Civilization, Culture, Disease

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• When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily--in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.

  Deborah Tannen

  Running, Two Sides, Long

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• The primary metaphor for the Easter season is the church as the resurrected people living a resurrected spirituality. Because of Easter we are in union with Christ and are called to live in our baptismal identity in his resurrection. This essential theme of Easter cannot be communicated in a day. It takes a season.

  Robert E. Webber

  Easter, People, Identity

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• The 1947 Court (Everson v. Board of Education) for the first time had used only Jefferson's metaphor - completely divorced from its context and intent.

  David Barton

  Christian, Religious, Board Of Education

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• I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

  Potter Stewart

  Christian, Religious, Wall

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• I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Life, Boxing, Goes On

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “On Boxing”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
  Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor.

  Ogden Nash

  Would Be, Employment, Literature

  1945 Many LongYears Ago,'Very Like A Whale'.

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• The debt ceiling debacle is almost a horrible metaphor: It's as if a bomb went off at 800 Pennsylvania Avenue and sent shrapnel flying in every direction. I don't know what these guys think they're doing, but it looks like they're committing political suicide.

  Charlie Cook

  Suicide, Thinking, Guy

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• The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Differentpoints of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.

  Donald Davidson

  Views, Plot, Common

  Donald Davidson (2001). “Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays”, p.184, Oxford University Press

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• I loved Catwoman's sense of humor. I love how sly she is. I love how she, to use a cat metaphor, walks the fence and you don't know which side she's going to come down on. She's totally independent. And let's face it, she's badass.

  Anne Hathaway

  Badass, Independent, Cat

  "Anne Hathaway Talks Fighting in Heels, Adapting to Nolan’s Universe, Filming in IMAX and More on the Set of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES". Interview on the Set, collider.com. May 27, 2012.

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• Transcendence is something between a metaphor and a miracle.

  Mason Cooley

  Miracle, Transcendence

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