"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense is this,—the employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the understanding,—those agents and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as the first includes the second, as a genus its species; for in a fable there must be nothing but what is universally known ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... delighted mutterings, such as "He's a stud-horse," and "Put the kybosh on 'em," and many more that have escaped my memory. But the Boy Orator's peroration I am glad to remember, for his fervid convictions lifted him into the domain of metaphor and cadence; and though to be sure I made due allowance for enthusiasm, his picture of Arizona remained vivid with me, and I should have voted to make the Territory a State ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... catalogues!—No, sir; 'twas I first enriched their style—'twas I first taught them to crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives, each epithet rising above the other, like the bidders in their own auction rooms! From me they learned to inlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor: by me too their inventive faculties were called forth:—yes, sir, by me they were instructed to clothe ideal walls with gratuitous fruits—to insinuate obsequious rivulets into visionary groves—to teach courteous shrubs to nod their approbation of the grateful ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... of the law to ourselves by what physical metaphor or analogy we will, however, the great matter is to apprehend its existence and the importance of the consequences deducible from it. For things which are like to the same are like to one another; and if, in a great ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... little about what may be called the geography of the invisible world. The religions, if I may continue the metaphor, have covered the vacant spaces of its map with imaginary monsters; the philosophies have ruled them with equally imaginary parallels of latitude. But both have affirmed, in opposition to the so-called practical man, that the meaning of the visible world is to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the matter in a nutshell and to descend from metaphor to plain business facts, you can not organize a company and begin to operate the mine or rather group of mines, for the reason that you can not secure a clear title, and what is worse, you have not, so far, succeeded in finding any ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nut-shell (a cocoa-nut shell, if you will—Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires) when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or endure it. "Give us enjoyment!" "Teach us endurance!" Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever unsatisfied and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... uttered violent language; but, since there was nobody present to hear him, it is likely he found small satisfaction in his profanity, rich though it may have been in metaphor and variety. So presently he betook himself off, going straight to the office in Legal Row of H. B. Sublette, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... let the rye alone. It is impious to insult the vegetables, by likening them either to human creatures or animals. Besides, the fever does not strangle. 'Tis a false metaphor. For pity's sake, keep silence. Allow me to tell you that you are slightly wanting in the repose which characterizes the true English gentleman. I see that some amongst you, who have shoes out of which their toes are peeping, take advantage of the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... To drop the metaphor, our historians will find themselves confronted by a startling change. The great Victorians write no longer, but are succeeded by eccentrics. There is Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted of them all, but not everybody's darling for all that. There is that prolific trio of best-sellers, Mrs. Humphry ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... might be suspected again with no greater reason. Instead of calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, The Rock might have raised a cry of non tali auxilio. It must always be remembered that besides the legitimate investors in Christian stocks, if so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there are unscrupulous persons whose profession it is to be bulls, bears, stags, and I know not what other creatures of the various Christian markets. It is all nonsense about hawks ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... the metaphor: for, as in a brothel the human body is sold for a price without shame, so the great harlot, the Court of Rome, and the Imperial Court, sell the liberty of Italy.... All the barbarous nations rush eagerly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture, a calm, strong angel, who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win—and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... prevent the admission of rain, or sea water, whereby their charges might be rendered incapable of service. A tewel (tuyau, or tuyal, Fr.) is a pipe; and is here used (for the sake of continuing the metaphor) for bore or calibre. Moxon, in his "Mechanick Exercises," defines the tewel to be that pipe in a smith's forge into which the nose of the bellows is introduced; and in a MS. fragment, said to be written by Sir Francis Drake, concerning the stores of one ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... is stated) that I must necessarily have descended from one or other of the contending parties, and be, of course, wedded for better or for worse, according to the reasonable practice of Scotland, to its dogmata, or opinions, and bound, as it were, by the tie matrimonial, or, to speak without metaphor, ex jure sanguinis, to maintain them ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the old-fashioned, all-round country doctor Applauds what would have blushed at a few years ago Architectural measles in this country Avoid comparisons, similes, and even too much use of metaphor Book a window, through which I am to see life Cannot be truthfulness about life without knowledge Contemporary play instead of character we have "characters," Disposition to make the best of whatever comes to us Do not habitually postpone that season of happiness Dwelling here. ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... there has been a pretty space of time; a pretty spell of work, which somebody has done! Thinkest thou there were no poets till Dan Chaucer? No heart burning with a thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word for,—what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor, and bold questionable originality. 'Thy very ATTENTION, does it not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO?' Fancy that act of the mind, which all were ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... smiled, somewhat pleased with his own skill in metaphor, and having rubbed his bow enough, he drew it lingeringly across the 'cello strings. A long, sweet, shuddering sound rewarded him, like the upward wave of a wind among high trees, and he heard it with much gratification. He would try the Cavatina again now, he decided, and bringing his music-stand ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your umbrella on your omnibus-top, with the public waterproof apron across your knees, and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of being part of the largest thing of its kind in the world, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... think that the Duke was quite candid. I have used in the concluding paragraph of my present book precisely the same argument as you have, even bringing in the bulldog,[63] with respect to variations not having been specially ordained. Your metaphor of the river[64] is new to me, and admirable; but your other metaphor, in which you compare classification and complex machines, does not seem to me quite appropriate, though I cannot point out what seems deficient. The point which seems to me strong is that all ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... metaphor for the reality of facts, can we not all recall feelings that have possessed us at sunset, when all the vivid impressions of the day, the brightness and clamor, are silenced? It is not that we miss the day, but that our ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... delicacy of taste, and all the dignity of expression that we reverence in the painter: his figures, where the subject gives him scope, are noble almost beyond imagination, his attitudes the most strictly appropriated to the sensations that inspire them, and his colouring, to borrow a metaphor from the sister art to express an excellence for which the other has yet no word of its own, is the greatest that we ever did or ever must expect to see. With all the sweetness and delicacy of his imagery, there is a glow of fire and freedom that at once surprises and charms ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... immeasurable series of predecessors. Moreover, every step they have made in natural knowledge has tended to extend and rivet in their minds the conception of a definite order of the universe—which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature—and to narrow the range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other than such as arise out of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... humour blent with pathos in his picture of this ill-rewarded old disciplinarian (who combined a tenderness of heart with a fondness for military metaphor that frequently reminds one of 'My Uncle Toby'), the details of the ailments and the portents that attended his infantile career, and, above all, the glimpses of the wandering military life from barrack ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... put each other to the sword for differences of opinion about the inheritability of certain characteristics; but no one seems to trouble himself much with the question a philosopher would think most important of all—precisely what is meant by the metaphor of 'inheritance' when it is applied to the facts of biology. (Indeed, it is still quite fashionable to talk not merely as if a 'character' were, like a house or an orchard, a thing which can be transferred bodily ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... amplification is necessary here in order to preserve Plutarch's metaphor. He was ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... for long. She had got up and moved about—flitted rather—so that Robert, who had never heard of a metaphor, thought of a brown leaf dancing in little gusts of wind. And then suddenly she had seen him and stood still. His heart had begun to pound against his ribs. For it was just like that that in his dreams his mother stood, looking ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... moderation the courteous remark that the statue "could not fail to be ridiculous in the expanse of New York Bay."[A] It is not necessary to touch upon the question of courtesy at all, but it is possible that one of our critics may live to regret his vegetable metaphor, and the other to revise his prematurely positive censure. There is a sketch in charcoal which represents the Bartholdi colossus as the artist has seen it in his mind's eye, standing high above the waters of the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... full of this kind of speaking and writing, which is called "metaphorical." The word metaphor comes from two Greek words meaning "to carry over." In "metaphorical" speech a name or description of one thing is transferred to another thing to which it could not apply ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... of figurative language is also an aid to clearness and to force. Simile, metaphor, personification, antithesis, balance, climax, rhetorical question, and repetition are all effective aids in the presentation of argument. The speeches of great orators are replete with expressions of this ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... "My metaphor," he continues, "will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel, who is playing ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's argument to the same ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... still more of God's tender care. "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him." This metaphor beautifully expresses the care and the tenderness of God toward his children. The eagle is noted for her great attachment to her young. Her care is extraordinary. When the little eaglets have attained age and strength to leave the nest and learn to fly, ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... very small steam-boat, for Guyandotte, on my way to the Virginia Springs. I have often heard the expression of "Hell afloat" applied to very uncomfortable ships in the service, but this metaphor ought to have been reserved for a small high-pressure steamboat in the summer months in America; the sun darting his fierce rays down upon the roof above you, which is only half-inch plank, and rendering it so hot that you quickly remove your ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... "I was speaking in metaphor, Don Manuel. What I mean is that I'll have to be shown. ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... moon was not full but on the wane; that it was only the fifteenth of the month and that the capon had gone to the mill; and that she asked him to spare the pheasant for the sake of the partridge. The prince, too, understood the metaphor, and having summoned the servant, he cried: "Rogue! you have eaten the capon, fifteen patties, and a good slice of the cake. Thank that girl who has interceded for you; if she had not, I ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... in similitude or metaphor; as you would say, cruel was one who did not allow a full enjoyment, and who lives more in the desire than in possession, and who, partially possessing, is not content, but desires, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... you think I saw in my dream that that man did when he found these Christians enforcing, as a necessary article of practice, as well as of faith, a baseless and bombastic metaphor, borrowed from that very Neo-Platonism out of which he had just fled for his life? He cursed the day he was born, and the hour in which his father was told, "Thou hast gotten a man-child," and said, "Philosophers, Jews, and Christians, farewell for ever and a day! The clearest words of your most ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... at last at Kinlossie House. Such days will come at times in human experience, both in metaphor and fact. At present we ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... cup shown in Fig. 27 is made of walnut; the ridges, carved in deep relief, stand out boldly, each one being carved, the letters forming a complete metaphor, to which is added the name of its original owner, the inscription reading ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... invention, proper expression, correct design, divine attitudes, and artful contrast, heightened with the beauties of clar. obscur., embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the delight and astonishment of the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive eloquence! the quaint metaphor, the poignant irony, the proper epithet, and the lively simile, are fled for ever! Instead of these, we shall have, I know not what! The illiterate will tell the rest ...
— English Satires • Various
... the smoking room. The warrior just back from the front had enquired after George Vanderpoop, and we, who knew that George's gentle spirit had, to use a metaphor after his own heart, long since been withdrawn from circulation, were feeling uncomfortable and wondering how to ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... resembling men but without mortal cares and a winged child which, in my dream, I already compared to Goethe's Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helena. This sphere lay still deeper - though one must understand the word deep wholly as a metaphor - than the beautiful joy-sphere with its ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... follow a little our metaphor: Christ, as I said, has put himself under the term of a physician; consequently he desireth that his fame, as to the salvation of sinners, may spread abroad, and that the world may see what he can do. And to this end, he has not only commanded, that the biggest sinners should have the first offer ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... 'god'; wine is a 'god' whose body is poured out in libation to gods; and in the unwritten law of the human conscience 'a great god liveth and groweth not old'.[12:4] You will say that is mere poetry or philosophy: it represents a particular theory or a particular metaphor. I think not. Language of this sort is used widely and without any explanation or apology. It was evidently understood and felt to be natural by the audience. If it is metaphorical, all metaphors have grown from the soil of current thought ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... ears is a strong and sacred metaphor. The rhyme is imperfect,—Shakspeare was not always ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... not nineteen, and the mirror of whose heart—to pursue my metaphor—was dulled, warped, and cracked with much ill-usage, grew sick of the boy's enthusiasm and the monotony of a conversation which I could divert into no other channel from that upon which it had been started by ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... But the metaphor "the King's limebox" could only occur in a district of betel-chewing and is a native touch. Many of the Filipino riddles introduce the names of saints and, to that degree, evidence foreign influence; but even in such ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... literary and fashionable circles. This inexhaustibly prolific writer is not in the least a stylist. In this respect he is inferior to Apuleius, or Tertullian, though he leaves them far behind in the qualities of sincere and deep sentiment, poetic flow, colour, the vividness of metaphor, and, besides, the emotion, the suavity of the tone. With all that, no matter how hard he tried, he could never grasp what the rhetoricians of his time understood by style. This is why his writings, as well as his addresses, were not very ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... nagging is not to encourage laudation, adulation, or encomium, or even praise. These can wait. The cow, to change the metaphor, will generally give her milk all the better if she is not in the act of being stroked or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... to call me 'little man.' Now I should call him a decidedly suspicious character. Looks something like an overgrown spider. Birds of a feather," he added sententiously, with an air of conscious rectitude, and a disregard for the propriety of the implied metaphor. It is not quite certain whether he had Andover or Pete in mind. But it is most probable that had he allowed The Spider to see Pete that evening and talk with him, The Spider would have left El Paso the next day, as he had planned, ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... unheated into the absurdities of War, and yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) recur—what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those white ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... rather bones (the radius and the cubitus the reader will pardon the anatomical designations), wrapped in a rough, blackened skin, and separated by some hard and cord-like veins. When he placed his hands on a table, he seemed to use a just metaphor of Pique-Vinaigre to play a ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... be in art, to take the metaphor of the temple at Jerusalem, three gradations or regions, which may be typified by the Court, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies. Into the Court many have admittance, both writers and readers; it is just shut off from the world, but admittance is easy and ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer metaphor for such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the trouble is that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical metaphor. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... attention to such passages as appeared to him deserving of especial commendation—and generally omitting no opportunity of exacting that entire admiration to which he believed his genius entitled him. Apart from a somewhat extravagant display of high-strained metaphor, the poem had merit, being bold in scope, sonorous and well rounded in tone, and here and there gracefully decked with original and pleasing thoughts. Throughout the whole, however, the singular propensity of the author for indulgence in morbid and gloomy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... rendered to the Indian Government; and recently he has added to his many accomplishments the rarer merit among men of that love of worth in others, which culminates in human brotherhood. His words of appropriate Oriental metaphor, in writing to the family, that his sense of personal loss in the man with whom he had for years, in the wildest solitudes and the most prolonged hardships, eaten "bread and salt" together, made it difficult for him ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... must not yield to the obsession of military metaphor. It is not what the enemy thinks or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters—it is what the men of the future ought to think, as being consonant with their own nature and with the nature of things. Ideas, like organisms, must abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisible ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... "Of course, if the ridiculous metaphor so familiar to the world were accurate, if the cloister were rightly compared to a tomb, the condition of the oblate would also be tomb-like, only its walls would be less air-tight, and the stone, a little tilted, would admit a ray ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... only a question of time when he would be President of the new corporation. I can see now the smile that lighted up his rather handsome face when he told me. He was "monkeying with a buzz-saw" all the same if he did but know it, and yet he always professed to follow the metaphor that he could "throw off the belt" that drove the pulley at his own good pleasure and so stop the connecting machinery before the teeth of the whirling blade could reach his fingers. Should it get beyond ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... it was, that our civilian pursuits offered no criterion upon which to base forecasts of our ability as acrobats. There was J. B., for example. He knew a mixed metaphor when he saw one, for he had had wide experience with them as an English instructor at a New England "prep" school. But he had never done a barrel turn, or anything resembling it. How was he to know what his reaction would be to this bewildering maneuver, a series ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... sermon ran on for an hour, a crude homily full of rude metaphor, with little of sentiment or pleading, severely didactic, mandatory as if spoken in a dungeon of the Inquisition. When Red Dick passed the hat among the congregation for a subscription to build a church, the contribution ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... What need to describe the sacred joy of those first few minutes, even if it were possible? But unrestrained tenderness between man and man, rare as it is, and, as it were, unaccustomed to itself, has no passionate fluency, no metaphor or poetry, such as man pours out to woman, and woman again to man. All its language lies in the tones, the looks, the little half-concealed gestures, hints which pass themselves off modestly in jest; and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... but the expression may be allowed when we consider that the same functional equilibrium which is looked back upon as a good by the soul it serves, first creates individual being and with it creates the possibility of preference and the whole moral world; and it is more than a metaphor to call that achievement a success which has made a sense of success possible and actual. That nature cannot intend or previously esteem those formations which are the condition of value or intention existing at all, is a truth too obvious to demand repetition; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the flats by bemoaning the loss of her. 80 One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,— A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on; What boots all your grist? it can never be ground Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round; (Or, if 'tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor, And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore, Or lug in some stuff about water "so dreamily,"— It is not a metaphor, though, 'tis a simile); A lily, perhaps, would set my mill a-going, For just at this season, I think, they are blowing. 90 Here, somebody, fetch one; not very far ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... smile. The stork is certainly a bird that has no sense. Power that is earned is never ridiculous, but power in the hands of one who is strange to it is first funny, then fussy, and soon pathetic. Punk is a useful substance, and only serves as metaphor when it tries to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... suppose that I deny the broad facts of what is called by the name of heredity. What I deny is that the name of heredity offers any scientific solution of a most difficult problem. It is a name, a metaphor, quite as bad as the old metaphor of innate ideas; for there is hardly a single point of similarity between the process by which a son may share the black eyes, the stammering, or the musical talent of his father, and that ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... her." On the literal interpretation of these words it was asserted that Jerusalem was the very centre of the world, or, as Jerome quaintly called it, "the navel of the earth." In the Talmud we find a beautiful metaphor in illustration of this view. It is in the last six lines of the ninth chapter of Derech Eretz Zuta, which read thus: "Issi ben Yochanan, in the name of Shemuel Hakaton, says, 'The world is like the ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... precisely what Scott knew best (in Melrose) and liked best, it is, here as elsewhere, quite as much himself[59] as Frank, that he is laughing at, when he laughs with Andrew, whose "opensteek hems" are only a ruder metaphor for his own ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hardly any of the superficial good qualities of modern versifiers.... He has not the current melancholy or resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of feeling for nature which runs to minute description and decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any living writers;... full of personality and with such power to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave, passionate world.... The beauty of it ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... ourselves realize that, happy as the issue of our intervention has been, it may entail upon us greater responsibilities, more serious action, than we have assumed before? that it amounts in fact—if one may use a military metaphor—to occupying an advanced position, the logical result very likely of other steps in the past, but which nevertheless implies necessarily such organization of strength as will ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... army was considered as being still more masterly and eloquent, and it was certainly well suited to the taste of French soldiers, who, as Bourrienne remarks, are wonderfully pleased with grandiloquence, metaphor, and hyperbole, though they do not always understand what they mean. Even a French author of some distinction praises this address as something sublime. "The proclamation to the army," says he, "is full of energy: ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... nerves. His muddy skin, with its sickly tones of green and yellow, expressed the jaundice of his balked ambition, his perpetual disappointments and his hidden wretchedness. He could talk and argue; he was well-informed and shrewd, and was not without smartness and metaphor. Accustomed to look at everything from the standpoint of his own success, he was well fitted for a politician. A man who shrinks from nothing so long as it is legal, is strong; and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... face. When he went into a fight, three pairs of pistols hung from a scarf, and two slow-matches, alight and projecting under his hat, glowed above his cruel eyes. Certainly, the light of battle was not in his case a metaphor. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... extraordinary and delightful than it had ever been my lot to encounter. I had the sensation of seeing light for the first time! For hitherto, as I have tried to explain, though it has been necessary to speak in terms of sight, I have done so only by a metaphor, and it was not really by vision that I became acquainted with the scene I have described. But now I saw, and saw pure light! And yet not only saw, but, as I thought apprehended it with the other senses, both with those we know and with others of which we have not yet dreamt. I heard light, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... fully obeying his own genius, he has gone beyond and some times exceeded the genius of language. His concise, vigorous and always forcible style, by its poignancy, emphasises and repeats the meaning. It may be said of his style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor, a style that has only been successfully employed by the French once, by Montaigne himself. If we wanted to imitate him, supposing we had the power and were naturally fitted for it—if we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns—it would ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Hornblower's heavy features indicated that he had grasped Persis' metaphor. He broke out eagerly. "Now, that's just what I was saying to ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... which prevent us from all starting fair and having our even chance of picking up a livelihood. We don't want to "divide up everything"—a most futile proceeding; but we do want to untie the legs and release the arms of the handicapped players. To drop metaphor at last, it is the conditions we complain about. Alter the conditions, and there would be no need for division, summary or gradual. The game would work itself out spontaneously without ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... historians who follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion removed; and—to take leave of our theatrical metaphor—I promise to fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often get from travelers' beds ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... stanzas which continue the metaphor of the sea or lake of air. The moon is its lotus, the sun its wild-duck, the clouds are its water-weeds, Mars is its shark and so on. Gorresio remarks: "This comparison of a great lake to the sky and of celestial to aquatic objects is one of those ideas which the view ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... vars guld blev moget. A striking metaphor meaning "the first head of grain that ripened ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... place he intimates what are meant by oxen and sheep, viz., the literal sense of the Scriptures. And if the literal sense be irrational and nonsensical, the metaphor we must allow to be proper, inasmuch as nowadays dull and foolish and absurd stuff we call Bulls, Fatlings, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various
... abstractedly out the window, "of 'winter lingering in the lap of spring,' though the metaphor is not in ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... tendency in the Dominions had been to magnify the powers of the king, who was equally their king, and to lessen the powers of the parliament elected in the United Kingdom. In fact the Crown became, if the metaphor is not too homely for such great {289} affairs, a siphon which transferred power from His Majesty's Government in the old land to His Majesty's ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... employed a more effective metaphor in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly emphasized. The student of ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... whole, to continue the same metaphor, consists in the cookery of the author; for, as Mr Pope ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the Church of England than his lordship—"for while you," says he, "are for setting the top on the picqued end and downwards, you won't be able to keep it up any longer than you keep whipping and scourging; whereas I am for setting the broad end downwards, and so 'twill stand of itself." The metaphor has obvious defects, but expresses the broadness of the Broad party ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... instead of imbibing the morning dews," said Father Wynn archly, illustrating his metaphor with a movement of his hand to his lips. "What have ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... meanings in the Bible must take wings after its kindred fancies of Greeks and Italians, at the touch of a ripening literary judgment. One rule holds of all human letters. Where there is legend, myth, metaphor, or other clear form of poetic fancy, language is to be read imaginatively. Otherwise, in the Bible, as out of it, the ordinary meaning ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... seem improper to call such a pet - By a metaphor, even—a bone; But though they agreed in adoring her, yet Each wanted to make her ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... Williams'—a frail bit of china putting itself to the coarse uses of earthenware—washing, scrubbing, sandpapering three generations of morals and bodies to make an ideal real. It was Wayland who had first described Mrs. Williams in that metaphor: "a piece of Bisque or Dresden," he had said, "and what those lousy Indians need is a wooden wash tub with lots of soft soap." Then, she wanted to see Mrs. Williams, to study her with this ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... that I'd put down any dirty stain before your Honour," sobbed Mrs. Twomey, recurring to her earlier metaphor; "it's that big horse that ye're afther buyin' from Docthor Mangan; they say that he gave him to ye too cheap on ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... would ask if we do not put the finest vases, and the costliest images in places of the greatest security, and most remote from any probability of accident, or destruction? By being so situated, they find their protection in their weakness, and their safety in their delicacy. This metaphor is far from being used with a design of placing young ladies in a trivial, unimportant light; it is only introduced to insinuate, that where there is more beauty, and more weakness, there should be greater ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... was a source of confusion in the early ages of science. Most of the superstitions of primitive religion, of astrology, and of alchemy, arose from this source. A good example is the extension of the metaphor in the words generation and corruption: words in constant use in scientific works until the nineteenth century began. Generation is the production of a substance that before was not, and corruption is the destruction of a substance, by its ceasing to be what it was before. Thus, fire ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... necessarily meagre, and mostly adulterated to serve Japanese interests. International relations placed—and, we repeat it, inevitably placed—on this footing resemble a boxing match in which one of the contestants should have his hands tied. But the metaphor fails in an essential point, as metaphors are apt to do—the hand-tied man does not realise the disadvantage under which he labours. He thinks himself as ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... that it alludes to the last or lowest stage of the supposed ladder of love; others that it refers to the first or elementary line traced by the student, when beginning to learn the art of painting. It is however more generally thought to be a metaphor taken from the chariot-races in the Circus, where, in going round the turning-place, he who was nearest was said "currere in prima linea;" the next, "in secunda;" and so on to the last, who took the widest range, and was said to run "in ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... By metaphor, language is put into the mouths of animals, particularly in fables. By a still further license, places and things, flowers, trees, forests, brooks, lakes, mountains, towers, castles, stars, &c. are made ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Laforgue. Under Strauss the Salome is neither impossible nor vulgar. Very intense, an apparition rather than a human, she sounds the violet rays of eroticism (if I may be forgiven such a confusion of terms, of such a mixed metaphor). Another thing: the tempi were different from Campanini's—i. e., the plastic quality of the reading gave us new colours, new scents, new curves. Strauss is careless when he directs the works of others, but with his own he is all devotion. Take Elektra, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the Ancient Britons, as a prophet or something more. The poems which he produced procured for him the title of "Bardic King;" they display much that is vigorous and original, but are disfigured by mysticism and extravagant metaphor. The four lines which he is made to quote above are from his Hanes, or History, one of the most spirited of his pieces. When Elis Wynn represents him as sitting by a cauldron in Hades, he alludes to a wild legend concerning him, to the effect, that he imbibed ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... could not help being disgusted by their tricks, their sly coquetry, their sentimentality, which seemed to expend itself by preference upon creatures hardly worthy of interest, their style crammed with metaphor, their love-making and sensuality, their hotch-potch of subtlety ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... the professor and his three companions were gambolling round the ship like so many porpoises—or dolphins, if they would prefer the latter metaphor—enjoying to the full the invigorating luxury of their bath ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... at the rustic maid's simile; and, not to be outdone in metaphor, told her there were dogs that barked, and dogs that bit. "Our master is one of those that bite. I've done the priest's business. He is as like to get the sack as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... put up with me when you knew nobody here," she said bitterly, "and as soon as you made friends with other people you threw me aside, like an old glove"—she repeated the stale metaphor with satisfaction—"like an old glove. All right, I don't care, but I'm not going to be made a ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... that the right of war and peace is in the nation. Where else should it reside but in those who are to pay the expense? In England this right is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... likely conceived, in a way that is very suggestive of carelessness and fallacy. There are obvious reasons for doubting whether the existence of mythology can be due to any "disease," abnormity, or hypertrophy of metaphor in language; and the criticism at once arises, that with the myth-makers it was not so much the character of the expression which originated the thought, as it was the thought which gave character to the expression. It is not that the early Aryans were myth-makers because their language ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... saliata 'l-Munkat'in"lit. "raining on the drouth-hardened earth of the cut-off." The metaphor is admissible in the eyes of an Arab who holds water to be the chiefest of blessings, and makes it synonymous with bounty ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of that. He was a little impressed by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he asked, abruptly. "I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn't such fun ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... before, anger, or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... mode of solving our problems. As it is, we reach a compromise, such as that of sleep, in which contact with reality is temporarily abandoned. In so far as sleep is psychologically determined, it is a regressive phenomenon. It is interesting that the most frequent euphemism or metaphor for death is sleep. Sleep is a normal regression. It does not always give the unstable individual sufficient relaxation from the demands of adaptation and so pathological regressions take place, one of which we ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... art is what metaphor is in speech. It is the representation to the eye of an object which suggests something else ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... given in a WILL, &c. I have some doubts whether reason always carries things as far as you would wish to carry this metaphor to make it a parallel. Reason sometimes moves in a small circle; and that too without being unreasonable. If the benefit is said to have been absolutely made, and reason is informed of the fact, it has a right to take it for granted, that the donor had the property to give, and that it ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... can't expect it to kiss the hand that slaps it in the face, as von Francius does," said Karl, driven to metaphor, probably for the first time in his life, and seeming astonished at having discovered a hitherto unknown mental property pertaining ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... stay, I shall stay with you," said Henrietta, dropping the metaphor, for metaphors, even the mildest, were beyond ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... singing of the light- hearted shepherd-boy. But at night the shadows come again; the shouts and vauntings of my adversary are heard; I can see his crimson eyeballs, full of malignant rage, glaring at me. To drop metaphor, my dear girl, my nights are simply hellish. But I shall conquer yet; my time will come. Only, to me, a sufferer turning on his bed and wishing for the dawn, how long the time delays its coming! If I could only feel the fresh breeze ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... every time we could because each of us wanted to pump the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew from the heart of May Martha Mangum—rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe Banks would never have been guilty of that. That is the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... passed away, the voice of Hohab was heard crying out, "Attend to me, attend to me, for I am the well-rubbed Palm-stem." The figure Hobab used represented a palm-trunk left for the beasts to come and rub themselves upon. It was a metaphor for a person much resorted to for counsel. John Talmage never called attention to himself, but the Arab chief must have counseled many, and well, to have taken a higher place than did this messenger ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... prevailed upon to abstain altogether from wine and spirits, he resented the vow thus forced upon him by imbibing an extraordinary quantity of the "spurious" liquid. When he says, "The waters have gone over me," he speaks in metaphor, not historically. He was never vanquished by water, and seldom by wine. His energy, or mental power, was indeed subject to fluctuation; no excessive merriment, perhaps, but much depression. "My waking life," he writes, "has much of the confusion, the trouble, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... not discern, in this Place, what an Injury is done to the original Image, by the military Metaphor? Recalling the 'Troops' of a Deluge, 'Drawing off its Forces'; and its 'Marching away, at a Signal,' carry not only a visible Impropriety of Thought, but are infinitely below the Majesty of That God, ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... is put forth once for all in His Incarnation and Death. 'He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham,' says the Epistle to the Hebrews, looking at our Lord's work under this same metaphor, and explaining that His laying hold of men was His being 'made in all points like unto His brethren.' Just as he took hold of the fevered woman and lifted her from her bed; or, as He thrust His fingers into the deaf ears of that poor man stopped by some impediment, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... and straining metaphor to the utmost, said that if the finger of Providence had not made her oversleep herself she would undoubtedly ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... waited grimly for that which was to come to him. True, there was the slight moisture on his brow and on his under lip, but otherwise his agitation displayed itself only in an occasional exuberance of metaphor. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... vividness with which he conjures up a picture before the congregation. He is a great artist in words. Dr. Talmage affects nothing; he is naturalness itself in the pulpit, and the manner of his speech suggests that he is angry with his subject. The sermon on this occasion lent itself well to a master of metaphor such as Dr. Talmage, it being a review of the last great battle of the world, when the forces of right and wrong should ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage |
