293 Metaphor Quotes

My wind is turned to bitter north, That was so soft a south before; My sky, that shone so sunny bright, With foggy gloom is clouded o'er My gay green leaves are yellow-black, Upon the dank autumnal floor; For love, departed once, comes back No more again, no more.

As ships becalmed at eve, that lay With canvas drooping, side by side, Two towers of sail, at dawn of day Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried.

If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea's speech.

It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

The blood will follow where the knife is driven, The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

I look like the wrath of grapes.

The coffee will be ready in a jitney.

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

When things get too heavy, just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.

Latins for Republicans - it's like roaches for Raid.

The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.

The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.

So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.

Elves are like trees, grounded and focused from the trunk down but graceful and agile on top.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Some asked me where the rubies grew, And nothing I did say; But with my finger pointed to The lips of Julia.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.

And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.

Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.

The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.

The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.

Look at The Rock's competition! Look at him! It looks like a big monkey came down here, took a crap, and out came Mankind!

Thank Heaven! the crisis - The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last - And the fever called 'Living' Is conquered at last.

Talk to him of Jacob's ladder, and he would ask the number of the steps.

Oh Portugal, today you are fog...

Presque tous les hommes ressemblent a ces grands palais deserts dont le proprietaire n'habite que quelques pieces; et il ne penetre jamais danss les ailes condamnees.

The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.' To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.

Du grosses Gestirn! Was ware dein Gluck, wenn du nicht Die hattest, welchen du leuchtest!

Wahrlich, ein schmutziger Strom ist der Mensch. Man mu? schon ein Meer sein, um einen schmutzigen Strom aufnehmen zu konnen, ohne unrein zu werden.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kampft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Teddy Roosevelt . . . once said, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick.' Jimmy Carter wants to speak loudly and carry a fly swatter.

Manhood stands tall and high, and becomes madness; The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy. When iron sated with blood embraces love, It turns into a bewildered sitar string. When time robs man of love and the loved one, He sees the beloved's glory and his own. How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

The vessel, though her masts be firm, Beneath her copper bears a worm.

It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

'I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions'.

Rochester: It would help if you bleed a little.

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.

'Dan liever de lucht in.'

When it comes to noses, you're a retailer. I'm a wholesaler!

Ich die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne.

Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

Send home my long strayed eyes to me, Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests.

'Little is know of Sierra Lione/And how it connects to the diamonds we own/When I speak of diamonds in this song I ain't about the ones that be glowin'/I'm talkin' bout Roc-a-Fella my home...'

I've got a ticket, To the fast city, Where the bells don't really ring, Getting off the plane the cold air, Rushes like bullets through my brain, And I'm divided between penguins and cats, But it's not about what animal you've got, It's about being able to fly, It's about dying nine times.

Seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men.

If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

An Assyrian wax statue, effeminate, but with the vitality of twenty men.

'Alf Todd,' said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, 'has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild-cat's ear with a red-hot needle.'

He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.

Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution.

If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.

I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.

Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.

'I want to know what the devil you mean by keeping coming into my private apartment, taking up space which I require for other purposes and interrupting me when I am chatting with my personal friends. Really one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.'

The cosy glow which had been enveloping the Duke became shot through by a sudden chill. It was as if he had been luxuriating in a warm shower-bath, and some hidden hand had turned on the cold tap.

Aunt Agatha is like an elephant-not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets.

I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous.

I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven.

She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo.

Elephants are contagious.

Spinoza saw ... that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, 'I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.'

I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.

'I am making a very personal commitment myself. This is a war I am not accustomed to but it is a global war and we are in a global army, fighting against a global enemy - HIV/AIDS.'

As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It's being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the eye to come back to the United States.

How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below. I have to be gone for a season or so.

You could not tell, and yet it looked as if The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff, The cliff in being backed by continent; It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, 'Why don't you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To every thing on earth the compass round, And only by one's going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

She drew back; he was calm 'It is this that had the power,' And he lashed his open palm With the tender-headed flower.

A hypnotist's crystal... sparkled with diamonds.

The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul.

Dark as pitch.

Our cock won't fight.

'Elephants are eating my face.'- Dave Matthews 12.16.06, Warren Haynes' 18th Anual Xmas Jam

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.

...his head emerged cautiously, like a snail taking a look around after a thunderstorm.