122 Quotes About Metaphors

The universe unfurled in such unpredictable ways. We all moved in a constant celestial dance. The song ends and the music and our partner may change, but in order to survive we must continue dancing.

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors […] The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.

Metaphors that have the community’s seal of approval roll off the tongue so readily that, by any yardstick, they are invariably thick on the ground.

For the expressions to proliferate so easily, speakers and hearers must be dissecting the implied metaphor to lay bare the connexions between the things named by the metaphor and the abstract concepts they are really talking about. (In literary theory these are sometimes called the ‘vehicle’ and the ‘tenor’ of the metaphor; cognitive scientists call them the ‘source’ and the ‘target’.)

Blah blah blah run from the raptors some more, and then OH SHIT, T. REX COMES IN AND SAVES THE DAY AND EATS THE RAPTORS AND IT IS RIGHTEOUS AS HELL. Keep this metaphor with you always—it is very useful when you have more than one problem at once. Sometimes you have to let the T. rex fight the raptors. RATING: 10/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

This is a view that reminds you of you.This is a metaphor you had nothing to do with.

How foolish was the fox. How blind. To not see, not value the friendship, the affection, the trust the brown bird offered him.