These metaphor quotes will inspire you. A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging metaphor quotes, metaphor sayings, and metaphor proverbs.
Best Metaphor Quotes
- “God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” ~ Orson Scott Card
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“Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote.” ~ Travis Kalanick
- “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
- “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.” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “Life is like an elevator. On your way up, sometimes you have to stop and let some people off.” ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour , Metaphor quotes about life
- “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.” ~ Aristotle
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“I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.” ~ Bernard Malamud
- “Hope is a song in a weary throat.” ~ Pauli Murray
- “Faith and prayer are the vitamins of the soul; man cannot live in health without them.” ~ Mahalia Jackson
- “Never be afraid to be a poppy in a field of daffodils.” ~ Michaela DePrince
- “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” ~ Aristotle
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“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don’t see a different purpose for it now.” ~ Dorothea Tanning
- “Somebody is waiting on the other side of your obedience.” ~ Tim Storey
- “We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
- “Pain is the best instructor, but no one wants to go to his class.” ~ Choi Hong Hi
- “Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.” ~ Jane Hirshfield
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“People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.” ~ Jack Nicholson
- “Metaphor for the night sky: a trillion asterisks and no explanations.” ~ Robert Breault
- “The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.” ~ Paul Valery
- “If your life were a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?” ~ Amy Purdy
- “My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application-not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech-and learn them so well that words become works.” ~ Seneca the Younger , Metaphor quotes happiness
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“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor” ~ Milan Kundera
- “Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.” ~ Jane Hirshfield
- “A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.” ~ Neil Postman
- “Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.” ~ Florence King
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“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.” ~ Robert Frost
- “Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s not only how we express what we remember , it’s how we interpret it – for ourselves and others.” ~ Twyla Tharp
- “Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.” ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin
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“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” ~ George Lakoff
- “When we become hollow bones there is no limit to what the Higher Powers can do in and through us in spiritual things.” ~ Frank Fools Crow
- “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.” ~ Milan Kundera , Metaphor quotes about love
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“On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.” ~ Patrick Kavanagh
- “Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.” ~ Peter Cochrane
- “The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.” ~ Northrop Frye
- “Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.” ~ Paul de Man
- “The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
- “Science is all metaphor.” ~ Timothy Leary
- “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” ~ George Lakoff
- “In golf, as in life, you get out of it what you put into it.” ~ Sam Snead
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“A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.” ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg
- “Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” ~ George Lakoff
- “[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents” house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.” ~ Anna Quindlen
- “Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward. Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world. And let us be joyful in the homecoming.” ~ George McGovern
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“A metaphor is like a simile.” ~ Steven Wright
- “We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable, so maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.” ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell
- “Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that’s been our unifying cry: “More light.” Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlight. Neon. Incandescent. Lights that banish the darkness from our caves, to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier’s field. Little tiny flashlight for those books we read under the covers when we’re supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor… Light is knowledge. Light is life. Light is light.” ~ Diane Frolov
- “It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.” ~ John Green
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“The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.” ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi
- “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “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.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “I don’t go into the studio with the idea of ‘saying’ something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.” ~ Richard Diebenkorn
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“I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.” ~ Charlie Kaufman
- “Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.” ~ Stephen King
- “I love metaphors. I’ve never been on this train. … If I’m standing on the middle of a track, I’m definitely going to get derailed. I have to make sure that I’m on the train and not in front of it.” ~ Serena Williams
- “Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wantedto build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home” ~ Edvard Grieg
- “Necessity is the mother of all invention.” ~ Albert Einstein
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“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.” ~ Mata Hari
- “In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.” ~ Heinrich Heine
- “Kurds are like fire, if approached kindly they will warm you, if approached badly they will burn you” ~ Leyla Zana
- “No matter what you do, you’ll never run away from you.” ~ Barry Mann
