Jack Nicholson
Actor, Filmmaker
"People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."
Metaphor quotes
Metaphor
214 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Robert Frost
Poet
"Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world."
Florence King
Author
"Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in."
Marshall McLuhan
Philosopher, Media Theorist
"All words, in every language, are metaphors."
Robert Anton Wilson
Author, Philosopher
"We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor."
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Topics related to Metaphor
Browse quotes that often appear alongside metaphor — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Metaphor quotes (page 1 of 11)
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"Necessity is the mother of all invention."
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"An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors."
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"The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It's a metaphor. It's not about anything."
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"Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor."
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"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor."
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"The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor."
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"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."
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"The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor."
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"A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious."
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"I don't like seeing myself on television and I don't enjoy filming. What I actually enjoy is thinking about how I am going to express something or how we are going to make the visual metaphor."
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"You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it."
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"All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."
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"Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors."
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"Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor"
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"Life's metaphors are God's instructions."
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"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street."
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"Censorship is the mother of metaphor."
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"Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with."
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"Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition."
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"It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke."
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