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Metaphor Quotes

Browse 2099 quotes about Metaphor.

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Metaphor Quotes

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world... Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

HappinessPhilosophicalMetaphorSighIllusionsIrreligionReligious Criticism
Book:Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
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“Social media itself is a metaphor for people who chase the algorithms set up by society in a desperate search for power, happiness, meaning, and social and financial success. Every social media platform has been a progressively worse social experiment. This is because they were all built according to the existing coercive models we were already living under. None of them has been designed to remedy the problems we had before.”

HappinessSuccessMetaphorSocial MediaAlgorithms
Author:Heather Marsh
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“Unspoken Sonata by Stewart Stafford Love's lullaby's unheard duet, Kisses of life drown shallow opinions, Prejudged by logic, yet set apart, Our oasis bars the negative legions. Eternal tongues of a mother lode; Looks of love, a second-sight ploy, To visions beyond earthly interpretation; Dance down darkest paths to ecstatic joy. Spoiler seers nix romantic ideals; Abyssal agendas in jealousy's biome, A caterpillar doxxed for its butterfly shape, Real love's navigator guides us home. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

LoveInspirationalRomancePoetryHopeRelationshipsMetaphorContemporaryValentine S DayModern Poetry
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Have you come across a phenomenon which we might call “parallel conversations” before? What do I mean by that? I mean where one thing can be said at a rational and everyday level, and yet something else, some other message or signal, modulates that basic carrier wave. ... [S]omeone might use a metaphor or a common saying (either knowingly or unconsciously) such as “There's no point in mending fences while the wind s up”, which might rationally fit in with a physical task that they were carrying out at home over the weekend, and yet might convey other meanings to whomever they were talking to.”

MetaphorHidden MeaningEsp
Book:Secret Friends: The Ramblings of a Madman in Search of a Soul
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“The Architect’s Prologue: The Occupation of the Void by Stewart Stafford “Lost are the seekers of miracles. Only in the end, in the telling and re-telling of the tale, is the miracle seen — Life." I crave the blank space that once was nothing— a silent void, an impatient canvas, a domain unclaimed. The emptiness that sired every iota of art on earth, fashioned by those daring hands to cram with humour, fear, obsession, logic, love, or passion. The human animal’s cursed superpower — consciousness — Finitude’s simultaneous scalpel and wound, lock-picked instinct’s shackles, freed this chosen being, to the detached observance of its kind and the world. As the only creature gifted enough to ask “why,” it sought meaning and virgin-birthed the quadruplet firmaments of art, theology, politics, and philosophy— the golden ignition of the divine spark of creativity writ large. Feast upon the field of canary yellow rapeseed Translucent on a day of blinding sunlight. See how the colour transcends structure and lives, dances, and breathes— Nature unveils its primordial palette, inviting insects to pollinate and Man to dare to dream of creating torch-bearing vibrancy, shockingly intense, and timeless. If your written words become literal nails to crucify you with, Then you have done your job well. You provoked a reaction. Writing that moves not is a body without a soul— a comrade of the anonymous unknown soldiers of literature. Let untouched parchment be our stage, and the vacuum our rousing scene, Promethean agency as alchemy’s fire— not supplicant-sought from unseen forces, but struck from the living earth itself. When golden boughs spring from rotting trunks, mortal man resists their provenance; yet the evidence of his eyes is the blinding truth. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

PhilosophyInspirationPoetryNatureCreativityPowerCreationMetaphorExistentialismPromethean
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The fishing pole bends, almost to the point of breaking. If you succumb to your base desires, you will snap under that pressure. Strengthen yourself by heeding the teachings of the Higher Power. Hold steadfast to your principles. They will guide you to the light. If you remain strong yet humble, you will not snap, and you will help others proceed.”

WisdomSpiritualityMoralityPerseveranceMetaphorTemptationInner StrengthSelf DisciplineParable
Book:The Zodiac Quest: A LitRPG Adventure
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“Boundaries aren’t walls. They’re bridges—back to your energy, your clarity, your well-being. And here’s the surprising twist: they’re also acts of kindness toward others.”

RelationshipsKindnessMetaphorBoundariesWell BeingSelf RespectInsightfulSelf Care
Book:The Therapist's Handbook for Healing Your Simpsons Syndrome: Unhook from Your Inner Chaos Characters with CBT, ACT, and a Little Humor
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“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”

ReligionMetaphorMythOrganized ReligionBelieversAtheistsTheists
Book:Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
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“The numbers grow as the technology and its accessibility grow. The technology by its very nature encourages more and more passive acquiescence to the graphic depictions. Passivity makes the already credulous consumer more credulous. He comes to the pornography a believer; he goes away from it a missionary.”

TechnologyFeminismMetaphorPornographyNormalization
Book:Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin
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“Sie gingen nach draußen, an den Kirschbäumen vorbei, über den Graben zu den Apfelbäumen, die Dirk zum Felde vor ein paar Jahren neu gepflanzt hatte, sie waren noch sehr klein, die Blüte hatte schon begonnen. Jetzt waren sie vereist. Zweige, Blätter, Blüten sahen aus, als wären sie in Glas gegossen, Bäume wie Kronleuchter, sie blendeten im frühen Sonnenlicht, man ging durch einen Spiegelsaal. Sie gingen schweigend, hörten nichts als ihre Schritte auf dem vereisten Gras und über sich die Möwen. In dicken Tropfen fiel das Wasser von den Bäumen, weil das Eis jetzt in der Sonne schmolz. „Man kriegt das nicht so oft zu sehen“, sagte Vera. Sie blieben stehen, die Hände in den Taschen, es war sehr schön. „Alles hinüber“, sagte Anne. Vera schüttelte den Kopf. Sie nannten es Frostberegnung, die Bauern machten es in kalten Frühjahrsnächten, besprühten ihre Blüten mit feinen Wassertröpfchen, die im Nachtfrost dann zu einer dünnen Eisschicht wurden. Eismäntel für die Blüten. Frostschutz durch Vereisung.”

MetaphorTraumaGermanMetaphoricalExpulsion
Book:Altes Land
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“When sexual liberation was the order of the day, the watchword was 'Maximize sexuality, minimize reproduction' . The dream of our present cloneloving society is just the opposite: as much reproduction and as little sex as possible. At one time the body was a metaphor for the soul, then it became a metaphor for sex. Today it is no longer a metaphor for anything at all, merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization or overarching purpose: the body is thus given over to the pure promiscuity of its relationship to itself - the same promiscuity that characterizes networks and integrated circuits. The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere. This is an aspect of a general tendency towards transsexuality which extends well beyond sex, affecting all disciplines as they lose their specificity and partake of a process of confusion and contagion - a viral loss of determinacy which is the prime event among all the new events that assail us. Economics becomes transeconomics, aesthetics becomes transaesthetics, sex becomes transsexuality - all converge in a transversal and universal process wherein no discourse may have a metaphorical relationship to another, because for there to be metaphor, differential fields and distinct objects must exist. But they cannot exist where contamination is possible between any discipline and any other. Total metonymy, then - viral by definition (or lack of definition). The viral analogy is not an importation from biology, for everything is affected simultaneously and under the same terms by the virulence in question, by the chain reaction we have been discussing, by haphazard and senseless proliferation and metastasis. Perhaps our melancholy stems from this, for metaphor still had its beauty; it was aesthetic, playing as it did upon difference, and upon the illusion of difference. Today, metonymy - replacing the whole as well as the components, and occasioning a general commutability of terms - has built its house upon the dis-illusion of metaphor.”

MetaphorLiteralnessMetonymy
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men's hands, since the publication of Newton's ‘Principia’, is Darwin's ‘Origin of Species.”

ScienceGoalBusinessKnowledgeHistoryOceanIntellectualInfiniteMetaphorBiologyJustificationNewtonUnknownPossessionsOrigin Of SpeciesDarwinAnalogySolidityCharles DarwinIsaac NewtonPrincipiaIllimitableInexplicability
Author:Thomas Henry Huxley
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“Route 66 is a symbol for relishing life through-and-through via the senses; the Interstate represents missing out on life. You go from point A (birth) to point B (death) utterly oblivious to what’s happening in between.”

ExperienceMetaphorRelish Life
Book:The Last Hobo: A Clueless Detroit Kid Hitchhikes Across America the Summer the Seventies Ran Out of Gas
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“At its core, neurodivergence simply means your brain works differently than what's considered typical. Think of it like this: if neurotypical brains run on one operating system, yours runs on another. Neither is better or worse. They're just different. And that difference? It's not a bug in your code. It's a feature.”

InspirationScienceIdentityPerspectiveEmpowermentMetaphorAuthenticitySelf AcceptanceNeurodiversityStrength Based
Book:The Therapist's Handbook for Neurodivergent People: A NeuroFlex ACT Guide for Living Fully with ADHD, Autism, OCD, and a Neurodivergent Life
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“Your brain adapts and changes based on what you do and where you focus your attention. It's like creating a new hiking trail through a forest.”

InspirationScienceChangeEmpowermentMental HealthPersonal GrowthMetaphorResilienceAdaptationNeuroplasticity
Book:The Therapist’s Handbook for LGBTQ+: A NeuroFlex ACT Guide for LGBTQ+ Individuals, Families, and Friends to Thrive with Authenticity
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“The wrath of God is never an evil wrath. God gets angry because he loves people like a mother would love her child if someone were to harm it. There is something wrong if the mother never gets angry; it is safe to say that that is the unloving mother.”

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Book:Healology
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