100 Metaphor Quotes

Following is our list of metaphor quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about allegory.

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Famous Metaphor Quotes

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. - Orson Scott Card

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. — Orson Scott Card

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. — Aristotle

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects. — Pierre Bourdieu

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. — Aristotle

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in. — Florence King

A good simile,--as concise as a king's declaration of love. - Laurence Sterne

A good simile,--as concise as a king's declaration of love. — Laurence Sterne

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch. - Jack Nicholson

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch. — Jack Nicholson

A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together. — George McWhirter

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. — George Orwell

But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race. — Donald Antrim

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

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. — John Searle

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing. — Matthew Prior

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. — George Lakoff

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Short Metaphor Quotes

  • No matter what you do, you'll never run away from you. — Barry Mann
  • Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay. — Adrian Frutiger
  • Never be afraid to be a poppy in a field of daffodils. — Michaela DePrince
  • Life is like an elevator. On your way up, sometimes you have to stop and let some people off. — Ziad K. Abdelnour
  • Hope is a song in a weary throat. — Pauli Murray
  • Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it. — Oprah Winfrey
  • The crow will turn white and the heron black. — Filipino Proverbs
  • Pain is the best instructor, but no one wants to go to his class. — Choi Hong Hi
  • Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up. — Hans Christian Andersen

Metaphor Image Quotes

Metaphor quote Normality is a paved road. It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.
Normality is a paved road. It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.
Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote. - Travis Kalanick quote

Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote. — Travis Kalanick

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. - Walter Mosley quote

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. — Walter Mosley

A bodybuilder is a sculptor who carries with him his own material. - Serge Nubret quote

A bodybuilder is a sculptor who carries with him his own material. — Serge Nubret

You can build a throne with bayonets, but it's difficult to sit on it. - Boris Yeltsin quote

You can build a throne with bayonets, but it's difficult to sit on it. — Boris Yeltsin

Metaphors Of Life Quotes

Your body is the ground and metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopedia, your life story. Everything that happens to you is stored and reflected in your body. In the marriage of flesh and spirit divorce is impossible. — Gabrielle Roth

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things. — Jonathan Raban

The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path. — Larry Dossey

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. — George Lakoff

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life. — Jeanette Winterson

Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor. — Robert Breault

To dance, above all, is to enter into the motions of life. It is an action, a movement, a process. The dance of life is not so much a metaphor as a fact; to dance is to know oneself alone and to celebrate it. — Sherman Paul

Life is a series of collisions with the future. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us. — Donna Farhi

In golf, as in life, you get out of it what you put into it. — Sam Snead

Allegory Quotes

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life, a life like the scriptures, figurative. — John Keats

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. — Socrates

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories. — Stanley Kubrick

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful. — Joseph Addison

A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music. — Amos Oz

Freemasonry is 'veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols' because these are the surest way by which moral and ethical truths may be taught. It is not only with the brain and with the mind that the initiate must take Freemasonry but also with the heart. — Carl H. Claudy

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers. — Naguib Mahfouz

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. — J. R. R. Tolkien

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. — Haruki Murakami

Metaphysic Quotes

Art alone makes life possible - this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms... Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done. — Joseph Beuys

THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two. — Ken Wilber

The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick). — Robert Hooke

Love is metaphysical gravity. - Richard Buckminster Fuller

Love is metaphysical gravity. — Richard Buckminster Fuller

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. — Auguste Comte

Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is. — Martha Beck

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth. — Mahatma Gandhi

Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be. — Steven Holl

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics. - Gabriel Marcel

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics. — Gabriel Marcel

Whenever I see an erring man, I say to myself I have also erred; when I see a lustful man I say to myself, so was I once; and in this way I feel kinship with everyone in the world and feel that I cannot be happy without the humblest of us being happy. — Mahatma Gandhi

People Writing About Metaphor

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Aristotle

Aristotle
quotes on life, love and success

1252 18854
Read quotes by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card

484 1560
Read quotes by Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu
quotes on education, culture and capitalism

18 645
Read quotes by Florence King

Florence King
quotes on slavery, education and religion

108 521
Read quotes by Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne
quotes on education, life and love

210 761
Read quotes by Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson
quotes on life, truth

195 712

More Metaphor Quotes

Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something's time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings. — Henry Cloud

My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it. — Saul Bass

When we become hollow bones there is no limit to what the Higher Powers can do in and through us in spiritual things. — Frank Fools Crow

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken. — Marion Woodman

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. — Northrop Frye

The passed Pawn is a criminal, who should be kept under lock and key. Mild measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient — Aron Nimzowitsch

Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples. — John Searle

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

The balcony is a metaphor for a mental and emotional place of perspective, calm, and self-control. If life is a stage and we are all actors on that stage, then the balcony is a place from which we can see the entire play unfolding with greater clarity. To observe ourselves, it is valuable to go to the balcony at all times, and especially before, during, and after any problematic conversation or negotiation. — William Ury

An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness. — Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now. — Dorothea Tanning

If your life were a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? — Amy Purdy

Kurds are like fire, if approached kindly they will warm you, if approached badly they will burn you — Leyla Zana

A country without freedom is like a prisoner with shackled hands. — Filipino Proverbs

I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue. — Richard Diebenkorn

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

I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world. — Mother Teresa

If these United States can be called a body, then Kentucky can be called its heart. — Jesse Stuart

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that. — Joseph Campbell

Movement is my medicine, my meditation, my metaphor and my method, a living language we can rely upon to tell us the truth about who we are, who we are with, and where we are going. There is no dogma in the dance. — Gabrielle Roth

Somebody is waiting on the other side of your obedience. — Tim Storey

Much of the problems of modernity is taking religion literally and science metaphorically, rather than the reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future. — Bruce Mau

A great brand is a story that’s never completely told. A brand is a metaphorical story that connects with something very deep – a fundamental appreciation of mythology. Stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience. — Scott Bedbury

So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor. — Percy Wynham Lewis

So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor. — Wyndham Lewis

The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future. — Kazuaki Tanahashi

In Conclusion

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