Top 191 Metaphor Quotes

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that’s wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

There’s a style in modern dance right now called Release Technique. It’s based on a feeling of falling and catching yourself, and I thought it was such a good metaphor for the way life feels.

The beauty of the original monster movies is that you were able to relate to every single character, or even to treat their monstrosity as an emotional metaphor.

The pivotal scene in ‘AK,’ where Jackie Shroff ‘s character Singaperumal parades around his room in the buff, is a metaphor for his false sense of prde and arrogance.

It’s like how science fiction in the ’50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it’s a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.

Pachinko, like all gambling, is rigged. The house always wins. It’s a central metaphor of life. It’s rigged, but you keep playing.

As a young physician in the mid-’80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.

I’m not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.

My books tend to have a lot of questions in them, and they tend to avoid black and white, for lack of a better metaphor.

My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you’re not quite ready for, ever.

The songs that work best are broad lyrically and have one strong concept in the metaphor.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

We Americans love to cite the ‘political spectrum’ as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

Superhero movies are so famous because of the metaphor that they trigger in one’s self about who you could be if things were different.

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor’s almost imperceptible touch.

There were definitely songs in the past that were me dealing with living this gender dysphoria, and sometimes they were really direct and no one picked up on it – but oftentimes, they were more veiled in metaphor.

If you’re gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you’re sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

Some say Hollywood movies that are made about boxing are just metaphors for other things, I think I’ve made one that’s actually about boxing and not a metaphor.

It’s easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group. It’s also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and has a completely different agenda on their mind, and anybody who gets in their way, they just get rid of them. Does that sound familiar?

In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.

Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it’s just about turning into metaphor whatever’s going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words.

But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I’m trying to get to is the positive value of negation.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.

‘Hedwig’ is not autobiographical, but what she goes through is clearly a big metaphor. She doesn’t want to be what she is, but she comes to an understanding that what happened to her has actually made her whole.

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.

We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of ‘how do we find our authentic selves?’ And that we all – whether we’re actors or not – perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?

A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I think the song itself, ‘Smoke and Fire,’ is just a metaphor for the feelings that you feel in a relationship.

Speed bumps, I was thinking, you know, you’re driving along, everything’s OK, and then there’s a speed bump to go, ‘Slow down.’ Go over it real slowly, and you hit the pedal, and you keep going, and I just thought it was kind of a nice metaphor for life.

To me synchronised swimming is a metaphor for the job of being a girl. They have to fake their smiles, they’re made up like dolls and they can’t show the effort they’re making, yet under the surface of the water it’s a struggle and a sacrifice.

I spent the first 22 years of my life absorbing everything, like a big disgusting cell, and now I’m disgorging it with jokes added out into the world. That’s a really gross metaphor.

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

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

I know that I’m going to die and that you’re going to die. I can’t do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Our home, just like our garden, evolves. We experiment, try out different things and new colors until we feel content. Try to keep the metaphor of home as garden in your consciousness.

I love sports. Anytime I can combine sports with a film I’m a happy guy. It’s such a natural fit, because sports always seems to be a metaphor for life. Always, always, always.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don’t think I can imitate it, but there’s a density to it that I think I’m always trying to push towards in English.

I never said I could save Braddock. It’s not about me. It was never even just about Braddock. It was a metaphor. Places like this matter.

Baseball, of course, has long been played under the burden of metaphor. More so than basketball or football, it is supposed to represent something larger than itself.

There’s a great metaphor that one of my doctors uses: If a fish is swimming in a dirty tank and it gets sick, do you take it to the vet and amputate the fin? No, you clean the water. So, I cleaned up my system. By eating organic raw greens, nuts and healthy fats, I am flooding my body with enzymes, vitamins and oxygen.

Generally, people’s fear and hesitancy regarding greater computerization comes from a George Orwell/’1984′-based metaphor of a single computer or data base where all your information is stored, knows everything about you, and can use this information at will and for evil purposes.

Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.