Metaphor Quotes - Page 39

• 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.

  Fritjof Capra

  Beautiful, Religious, Art

  "The Tao of Physics". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1975.

  79 Copy quote

  Show source

• Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

  M. John Harrison

  Stories, World, Realizing

  48 Copy quote

• In a sense everything that is exists to climb. All evolution is a climbing towards a higher form. Climbing for life as it reaches towards the consciousness, towards the spirit. We have always honored the high places because we sense them to be the homes of gods. In the mountains there is the promise of... something unexplainable. A higher place of awareness, a spirit that soars. So we climb... and in climbing there is more than a metaphor; there is a means of discovery.

  Rob Parker

  Motivational, Home, Mean

  45 Copy quote

• I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.

  Roger Caillois

  Memories, Needs, Syntax

  Roger Caillois (1985). “The writing of stones”, Univ of Virginia Pr

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is merely a metaphor to call competition competitive war, or simply, war. The function of battle is destruction; of competition, construction.

  Ludwig von Mises

  War, Competition, Battle

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Socialism - An Economic and Sociological Analysis: The Economist”, p.285, VM eBooks

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A society that could heal the dismembered world would recognize the inherent value of each person and of the plant, animal and elemental life that makes up the earth's living body; it would offer real protection, encourage free expression, and reestablish an ecological balance to be biologically and economically sustainable. Its underlying metaphor would be mystery, the sense of wonder at all that is beyond us and around us, at the forces that sustain our lives and the intricate complexity and beauty of their dance.

  Starhawk

  Real, Animal, Expression

  64 Copy quote

• Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopaedia, your life story.

  Gabrielle Roth

  Philosophy, Expression, Medicine

  Gabrielle Roth, John Loudon (1998). “Maps to Ecstasy: A Healing Journey for the Untamed Spirit”, p.29, New World Library

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe #‎ running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Believe, Clear Goals

  10 Copy quote

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

  Gore Vidal

  War, Terror

  13 Copy quote

• The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Hurt, Phrases, Stories

  117 Copy quote

• Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.

  Twyla Tharp

  Art

  Twyla Tharp, Mark Reiter (2003). “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life”, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

  George Steiner

  Stars, Moon, Imagination

  22 Copy quote

• Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Writing, Swings

  18 Copy quote

• The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.

  Jared Diamond

  Easter, Ocean, Islands

  66 Copy quote

• Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Heart, Islands, Matter

  6 Copy quote

• Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.

  Paul Auster

  Falling In Love, Confusion, Quality

  Paul Auster (2009). “Oracle Night: A Novel”, p.131, Henry Holt and Company

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

  Joseph Campbell

  Narrative, Myth, Symbolic

  Joseph Campbell (2002). “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion”, p.28, New World Library

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Stars, Sea, Rose

  Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men: A Novel”, p.84, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.

  Michael J. Fox

  Drinking, Destiny, Hands

  12 Copy quote

• I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

  Terence McKenna

  Book, Character, Thinking

  16 Copy quote

• Everything in life is a metaphor.

  Haruki Murakami

  Life Is

  "Kafka On The Shore". Book by Haruki Murakami, September 12, 2002.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

  Richard Rohr

  Honest, Language, Mystery

  Richard Rohr (2013). “Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self”, p.58, SPCK

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

  C. S. Lewis

  Imagination, Causes, Reason

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Selected Literary Essays”, p.265, Cambridge University Press

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Thinking

  25 Copy quote

• Enough of these phrases, conceit and metaphors,
  I want burning, burning, burning.

  Rumi

  Inspirational, Want, Phrases

  10 Copy quote