Quotes Tagged "metaphor"

People are like gifts, some are beautifully gift wrapped, but it's always on the inside that matters.

If you wish to find a needle in a haystack, light a match.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

You know what they say about air and water when it comes to fire, don’t you?” she asks. Now, I’m curious. She hasn’t spoken for the last ten minutes of the drive. “What?” “Too much air blows out the fire. Too much water destroys it.” I nod trying to determine what she’s really comparing us to. “The idea would be to keep the flame going, right. For years?” She nods. “Like a relationship. Like a marriage.” She cringes at the word marriage. Noted. “So you need the air—to stay constant—to fan the flames of the fire, and you know, grasshopper,” I smile at her and catch sight of the corners of her mouth turning slightly upward in response to the endearment, “a hot enough fire will burn water, so you have to be careful with the water too.” “That I do know,” she says softly. “So that’s the truth about air and water.” She sighs deep. “Which is?” “It’s hard to maintain the balance to keep the fire going. You have to fan the flames without putting it out with too much water. But too little water will burn the fire right up. Too much fire. Too much destruction. We’re out of control.” “You’re talking in circles,” I say. “No. That’s us,” she says with certainty.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest.

You can't go through the looking-glass without getting cut. You know that now, don't you?

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.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.

He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.

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.

Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.

it was like how I imagined water meeting the bank would be, eroding away at the strong surface and creating its impression in the soil, taking piece by piece away with each toss of the current. I was the embankment, and Hailey was the flowing water. Peaceful, graceful, tranquil

Hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind banging and banging itself to pieces.

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

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.

Aren't songs of grief lullabies to the lost?