Top 55 Metaphors Quotes

I’m surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.

I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.

There are two metaphors for Mario the person and not Mario the footballer. I think I am a man, but I don’t believe I need to say it. But I could also be Peter Pan because I do things my own way and I am free. So, yes, maybe I should say that I am Peter Pan – although I am much more of a man.

Vampires are total sexual metaphors; there’s just no way around that.

Why take notes? The obvious reason is to remember. Visual note-taking translates what we hear into pictures that give context, color, and meaning. By adding symbols, visual metaphors, likenesses of people, and room layouts, we add several dimensions.

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don’t think there’s any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry – if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

We are such materialists that all our metaphors are going to be material.

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it’s trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things.

The reason I keep making so many musical metaphors with ‘Luke Cage’ is that I don’t view it as much a television show as I do a concept album with dialogue.

The use of food metaphors is really well established English… Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you’ve got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

I think I’m good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn’t come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

Fiction isn’t made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

My fans have always loved my metaphors.

Religion is a huge part of our consciousness. I grew up in the Bible Belt, so it’s our mythology. Those are the stories we learn as little kids at Sunday school. I’m not afraid to use the metaphors, because I think the stories are beautiful.

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: ‘Big Bang,’ ‘selfish gene’ and so on. Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the ‘altruistic gene,’ but he’d never have sold as many books with a title like that.

Some of the metaphors you find in ‘Wicked’ – how those in power can exploit fear in others to maintain their power – I think, as Jews, we’ve seen that historically on more than one occasion.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

When you are trying to express things with metaphors and much more subtlety, that’s when you are doing yourself a disservice by making a video.

If you want to relate me to the newer cats, let’s go. Let’s go line for line and bar for bar. If it’s all about spitting and metaphors and MCing and lyrics and entendres, I will eat 99 percent of you dudes up.

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They’ve always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

Some of my favorite media is the still cartoon that you can sit and study. You can get amazing metaphors across really quickly. I’m in awe of a Charles Schulz.

My favorite artist was probably Jay-Z. He’s the one who inspired me to start writing music. He’s a wordsmith. He’s very clever. He uses a lot of similes and metaphors. He’s a beast of a rapper.

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They’re metaphors for the human condition.

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Everyone knows that metaphors are important, yet we have no idea why.

I’m a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

American art in general… takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don’t solve the right problem at the right time, that’s the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.

Many smart folks seem to think that if you just get your metaphors and messages right, you’ll win. That if you start describing what you favor as a ‘moral value’ – ‘affordable health care is a moral value’ etc., – then you’ll appeal to red-state voters.

Loser lit antiheroes aren’t well intentioned or earnest; they don’t care whether you like them or not. They’re self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

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

Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits – metaphors and paradoxes – that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations – unless a form can be found to contain them.

I’m interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.

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

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.

The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.

I’m a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.

That’s what happens in a good horror movie: there are always metaphors of greater subjects like humanity and empathy and compassion. It’s not about the action and scary moments: You really care about these characters because they’re mirrors of our own reflections.

Lil Wayne, that was one of my main influences, music-wise, because of his wordplay and metaphors.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in general – over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical – their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else’s because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.

When I’m directing actors, I often find myself slipping in sports metaphors, like: ‘Don’t go for the punch line here, just put it up on a T-ball stand so she can hit it out of the park.’