Metaphor Quotes - Page 2

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, “Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear.

The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest.

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can make sense of. A metaphor, in this "experiential" sense, is a process by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another domain of a different kind.

It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

Culture is like the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg -”the solid state of “water.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar

...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.

Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.

A river starts by longing for the ocean...

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

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.

If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.

The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn't have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what's commonly referred to as reality.

It’s comforting to me,” he added, “that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.

YThat perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? Me with my arms outstretched, feet in first position. The chromosome half of us don't have. Second to last in the alphabet: almost there. Coupled with an L, let's make an adverb. A modest X, legs closed. Y or N? Yes, of course. Upside-down peace sign. Little bird tracks in the sand.Y, a Greet letter, joined the Latin alphabet after the Romans conquered Greece in the first century -- a double agent: consonant and vowel. No one used adverbs before then, and no one was happy.

My mother always says that love is like a snakebite, a venom slowly spreading through your veins.

Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon ...

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.

They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

It was a quiet taunt...a poisoned glass of wine, meant to intoxicate and exsanguinate.

But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowledge of the primordial state would be like a lamp, which, when lit in the room, at once causes the darkness to disappear, enlightening everything. In the same way, if one has the presence of the primordial state, one can overcome all hindrances in an instant.

What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?""No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.""I see. And these are the clowns?"Foaly's head poked through the doorway."Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?

In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.

Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island.

By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are … what again? Something