"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... METAPHOR—A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another by speaking of it as if it were that other, or calling it ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... account. Certainly, thought I to myself, here is the famous spring; a brook that Wordsworth must have known, and that may have been the centre of memory to him in his description of those early Hawkshead days, with its metaphor ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... it was absolutely necessary. Here, alone with the harmless old man, he was not so much on his guard, and the sudden vibrating of every nerve at the word "Marburg," found vent in the whistle which surprised old Franz. One young police commissioner with a fancy for metaphor had likened this sudden involuntary whistle of Muller's to the bay of the hound when he strikes the trail; which was ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... got about half through the foregoing Chapter, it has had the inconvenience of what may be called running me off the rails; and now that I wish to proceed from the point at which it took place, I shall find some trouble, if I may continue the metaphor, in getting up the steam again, or if I may change it, in getting into ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... 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 beautiful harbor at twilight, when the lights are just beginning to twinkle ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... your eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages of your dream in full convocation round your bed and catch one broad glance at them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of their strangeness such as you never attain while ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... which is founded on official documents and coins, is without doubt more dependable than that of Plutarch, which is reducible to an imaginative metaphor; and the discovery of Letronne, concluding that concatenation of facts that I have set forth, finally persuades me to affirm that not a passion of love, suddenly re-awakened, led Antony in the second half of 37 ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... entitled "Tears of Sensibility" was merely a burlesque on the style of the magazine verses of the day. I could not suppose that you could have suspected me of seriously composing such a farrago of false metaphor and unmeaning epithet. It was meant solely for a caricature on the style of the poetasters of newspapers and journals; and, (though I say it who should not say it,) has excited more attention and received more praise at Cambridge than it deserved. If you have ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... imagination controlled the useful portion of the animal world, was more than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream ...
— Progress and History • Various
... 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 in preference to ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... have been even more prolific; but their progeny were ill-formed at their birth, and could never walk alone; whereas the mental offspring of our illustrious countryman came healthy and vigorous into the world, and promise long to continue. To vary the metaphor—the tree of some other men's fancy bears fruit at the rate of a pint of apples to a peck of crabs; whereas the tree of the great magician bears the sweetest fruit—large and red-cheeked—fair to look upon, and right pleasant to the taste. I shall conclude with the words of Sir Walter, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... the bolt of the night.— Beecher. 11. In that calm Syrian afternoon, memory, a pensive Ruth, went gleaning the silent fields of childhood, and found the scattered grain still golden, and the morning sunlight fresh and fair.—Curtis. [Footnote: In Ruth of this sentence, we have a type of the metaphor called Personification—a figure in which things are raised above their proper plane, taken up toward or to that of persons. Things take on dignity and importance as they rise in ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... 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
... bringing its persons into the final scene, with some loss of liveliness and a concomitant gain in unity of effect. He modernized his dialogue entirely, bringing up to date the usage and allusions of his original, and restraining the richness of its metaphor by removing the figures altogether or by substituting others more familiar. He omitted a good deal of bawdry, especially in Act II, scene ii. All these changes have parallels in other Restoration adaptations. Again, the songs and dances, which are all of Harris's ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... 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 free as ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... mixed into the water supply, also gave all that consumed them a greater tolerance for nuclear material. It was almost ironic that their whole way of life was dependent on the feces of another life form, but I will refrain from turning it into a metaphor. ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... should you now their fickle welcome ask, Faint shouts would greet the veteran of the mask; And ah! what anguish would it be to search For your old play-house in a bastard church! To find the dome wherein your hour you strutted, Altered and maimed and circumcised and gutted; Become in truth, all metaphor to drop, A mongrel thing—half chapel and half shop. Long had the augur and the priest foretold The sad reverse they doomed it to behold; Long had the school-boy, as he passed it by, And maiden viewed it with ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... sound system of practical morals, which should neither shelter the sinner under the cloak of speculative faith or of peculiarity of opinion, nor leave him loose to the waves of unbelief and schism. Something there was of an antiquated turn of argument and metaphor, but it only served to give zest and peculiarity to the style of elocution. The sermon was not read: a scrap of paper containing the heads of the discourse was occasionally referred to, and the enunciation, which at first seemed imperfect and embarrassed, became, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the breath long represt is hot, and bursts out so violently, that it resembles fire and smoke. The horse suppresses not his breath by any means so long, neither is he so fierce and animated; yet the most correct of poets ventures to use the same metaphor ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... trout in that manner Mr Tupper failed to explain, but his metaphor was always a worse fit than his trousers and that ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... what I say, we may find an injunction to the effect that a metaphor or a simile must be introduced from time to time, and that it must be new; but, since to the mind of the shallow-pated writer newness and modernity are identical, he proceeds forthwith to rack his brain for metaphors in ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... thing suddenly "taken up" he had suddenly "dropped it." He now, by way of the new development of his correspondence, approached it again. It received him as a former habitation receives a returned native. Mr. Simcox (if the metaphor may be pursued) roamed all about the familiar rooms and corridors of the house of the principles and mysteries of insurance. His knowledge of its possibilities enabled him to develop an astonishing ingenuity in creating cases ripe and yearning for the benefits of ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... anyhow, I have just come through one of the toughest bouts of relaxation I can remember, and my only solace for the slight weariness of such repose is the thought how much more tired the author, Mr. BASIL CREIGHTON, must be. With such a hail-storm of metaphor and epigram constantly dissolving in impalpable mist of mere words has he assaulted The History of an Attraction (CHATTO AND WINDUS) that the poor thing, atomised, vaporised and analysed to the bone, lies limp and lifeless between the covers, with hardly a decent rag of incident or story ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... act of political folly. He pleaded strenuously for delay in the introduction of parliamentary institutions into Egypt, on the ground that our attempts "to mitigate predominant absolutism" in India had been slow, hesitating, and tentative. He brought poetic metaphor to his aid. He deprecated paying too much attention to the "murmuring leaves," in other words, imagining that the establishment of a Chamber of Notables implied constitutional freedom, and he exhorted his countrymen ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... an inheritance 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 ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... But this metaphor of crystals is a very inadequate one, because crystals have no will in themselves; nor do crystals, having failed to grow in some particular form, presently modify that form more or less and try again. I see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which are indeed paid mercenaries ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... notice, it is the poetry that moves him: the great metaphor, the sonorous cadence, the honeysuckle fancy. He belongs to an age that had an instinct for beauty, and loved style—an age that, in the words of a modern wit, had not grown all nose with intellect, an age that went to the theatre to dream, not ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... something light and subtle which contrasts with the weight and grossness of material bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of a very naive physical metaphor. ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... noble voice? You get nothing done here gravely and decently. Tawdry stage tricks are played, and braggadocio claptraps uttered, on every occasion, however sacred or solemn: in the face of death, as by Barbes with his hideous Indian metaphor; in the teeth of reason, as by M. Victor Hugo with his twopenny-post poetry; and of justice, as by the King's absurd reply to this absurd demand! Suppose the Count of Paris to be twenty times a reed, and the Princess Mary a host ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... only for what ought to be. And for my 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, being a piece ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... shall only be removed by extravagant speculations, the ruinous consequences of which will not be perceived, or will be neglected, for the trifling advantages of the moment? and to make use of an energetic, but true metaphor, one that is terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... poets till Dan Chaucer?' asks our great Thomas; '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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all those mummeries through which, however, for conventional reasons she was obliged to pass. Her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be a story into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will. The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream. He was Corambe, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Inspiration. If the womanly woman possessed a talent, she did not use it—for this would unsex her—she sacrificed it in herself in order that she might return it to the race through her sons. Self-sacrifice—to use a worn metaphor—self-sacrifice was the breath of the nostrils of the womanly woman. It was for her power of self-sacrifice that men loved her and made an Ideal of her. Whatever else woman gave up, she must always retain her power of self-sacrifice if she expected the heart of her husband to rejoice ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... said Paul, refilling his glass, "though the public may allow you to eat your mutton off their backs for a short time, they will kick up at last, and upset you and your banquet; in other words (pardon my metaphor, dear Ned, in remembrance of the part I have lately maintained in 'The Asinaeum,' that most magnificent and metaphorical of journals!),—in other words, the police will nab thee at last; and thou wilt have the distinguished fate, as thou already hast ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is a bold metaphor, ingenious or horrible. A man's breeches are his kicks or trucks (montante, a word that need not be explained). In this language you do not sleep, you snooze, or doze (pioncer—and note how vigorously expressive the word is of the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... understand. I belong to another school to you. My set detests the prosaic and commonplace; we must have the clever and original. Platitudes are detestable to us, unless they come clothed in a brilliant metaphor. Homely virtues I neither pretend to understand or admire. I much ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... "Passon 'ee ain't much good, and passon 'ee ain't much harm. 'Ee's no more good nor more 'arm, so fer as I can see, nor a chip in a basin o' parritch." And that was just about it; sir,' said the old man, pleased for the hundredth time with his wife's bygone flight of metaphor and his ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Yankee is suspicious of eloquence, and "stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country." A stranger, who looked in for a few minutes upon one of Mr. Choate's jury-arguments, and saw a lawyer with a lithe and elastic figure of about five feet and eleven inches, with a face not merely of a scholarly ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... structure; a wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and flowers. Here mass is said by one of the conscript priests of the regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fir-trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral-forest. Near by was the grave-yard, where day by day these quiet elderly men lay their comrades, the peres de famille who don't go back. The care of this woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of our coast and island people, they seem to be for the most part a little artificial in method, a little strained in metaphor perhaps so giving rise to the Scotch Gaelic saying: 'as loveless as an Irishman.' Love of country, tir-gradh, is I think the real passion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of God. Constancy ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... 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 ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... in metaphor and still richer in quotation. From the Greeks, from the Romans, from the English, from America, from Australia, from all parts of the globe did the young writer cull incident and quotation. She used a brief and telling argument, and she brought it to a successful ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... laugh. "That's a fine metaphor, Mr. Gowan. But it does not happen to fit the case. It would not matter if the spike-hole had been pulled out and the post along with it, so far as concerns this ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... names are familiar to the readers of the Court Journal and Morning Post. Several noblemen, amateurs of the subject, arrived on horseback. By eight o'clock the four sides of Red Lion-square were, if we may be allowed the metaphor, a mass of living heads. We owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Davis, the respected and conscientious officer for the Sheriff of Middlesex; that gentleman, in the kindest spirit of hospitality, allowing us six inches of his door-step when the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... thousand years after his death he was regarded by the descendants of 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 awen ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... really Carlyle, who, sheltering himself under the disguise, and accepting only editorial responsibility, is enabled to narrate his own spiritual struggles and to enunciate his deepest convictions, sometimes, when they are likely to offend his readers, with a pretense of disapproval. The Clothes metaphor (borrowed from Swift) sets forth the central mystical or spiritual principle toward which German philosophy had helped Carlyle, the idea, namely, that all material things, including all the customs and forms of society, such as government and formalized religion, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... even with difficulty to ourselves, and, perhaps, to others. Our young friend, John Bunyan, stands on a giddy height—on slippery places, and," continued Mr. Staples, with a lofty disregard to consecutive metaphor, "his feet are taking fast hold of destruction." Here the child drew a breath of relief, possibly at the prospect of being on firm ground of any kind at last; but Sister Medliker, to whom the Staples style of exordium ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... recourse to. The metaphors and facons de parler to which even in the plainest speech we are perpetually recurring (as, for example, in this last two lines, "plain," "perpetually," and "recurring," are all words based on metaphor, and hence more or less liable to mislead) often deceive us, as though there were nothing more than what we see and say, and as though words, instead of being, as they are, the creatures of our convenience, ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... 56: Part of my sail.—Ver. 589. She borrows this metaphor from sailors, who, before setting out, sometimes unfurl a little portion of the sail, to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... said Warner, "they'd call that a considerable abuse of metaphor, but all metaphors are fair in war. Besides, it's just the way I feel, too. Do you think, Dick, we'll settle down to ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... faith of Tone and to express their full acceptance of the gospel of which Tone had given such a clear definition. That gospel had been taught before him by English-speaking men, uttered half-articulately by Shan O'Neill, expressed in some passionate metaphor by Geoffrey Keating, and hinted at by Swift in some bitter jibe, but it was stated definitely and emphatically by Wolfe Tone and it did not need to be ever again stated anew for any new generation. Tone was great in mind, but he was still greater in spirit. ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... conducted his flame (or rather his dish, to continue our metaphor) from the proprietor, he had projected a design of conveying her to one of those eating-houses in Covent- garden, where female flesh is deliciously drest and served up to the greedy appetites of young gentlemen; but, fearing lest she should not come readily enough ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... George Gorham said of Pixley, so I say of you: "The prison yawns before you, The turnkey stalks behind!" Now will you go? Or lag, and let that functionary floor you? To change the metaphor—you seem to be Between Judge Wallace ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history. The rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but by the goodness ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the world. But argument in this respect is simply wasted on the ruling caste in South Africa: there, Mr. Cross's views about "freedom, liberty," etc., will simply be laughed out of court, unless he limits them to white men; so that one sometimes wonders whether Christ's metaphor about "casting pearls before swine" does not find an application here. Look at the weighty arguments delivered inside and outside Parliament against the Natives' Land Act. Surely no legislature with a sense of responsibility could have passed that law after hearing arguments of such force ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... on, verse after verse, telling never one fact, yet hinting unutterable things in a language that was made for hint and metaphor and parable and innuendo. What tongue did not hint at was conveyed by subtle gesture and a smile and flashing eyes. It was perfectly evident that she knew more than King—more than the general at Peshawur—more ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... Here he was with many friends of his own age and kindred mind. Everything took on the color of rose. All of them were talking, but his own gift of speech was the finest. He clothed narrative with metaphor and illustration until it became so vivid that the others were glad to fall silent and listen to him, though Robert himself was unconscious of the fact. They made him relate once more his story of the battle as he saw it from inside the French lines at Ticonderoga, and, just as he came ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cordial. But the ties of blood, of marriage, and of friendship, the memory of mutual services, the memory of common triumphs and common disasters, were insufficient to restrain that ambition which domineered over all the virtues and vices of Walpole. He was resolved, to use his own metaphor, that the firm of the house should be, not Townshend and Walpole, but Walpole and Townshend. At length the rivals proceeded to personal abuse before a large company, seized each other by the collar, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... skarf, or pelecanus cardo, the cormorant. He compares the message of Thorwald to the cormorant shimming over the waves, and says he will never take it. "Snap at flies," a very common Icelandic metaphor from fish rising to ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... here, and I intend to stay. I would not go to a hotel for a single day, lest my resolution should fail me. I have thrown myself into this castle of care without even a garrison. I hope to hold it. Help me to man it. In a word, and without metaphor, I am here with the design of re-entering ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Upon which the Cambro-Briton, who on this occasion would have made no submission to the Great Mogul, surrounded with his guards, thanked the doctor for his mediation, and acknowledged himself in the wrong for calling the image of Cot a peast, "but," said he, "I spoke by metaphor, and parable, and comparison, and types; as we signify meekness by a lamb, lechery by a goat, and craftiness by a fox; so we liken ignorance to an ass, and brutality to a bear, and fury to a tiger; therefore I made use of these similes to express my sentiments ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his varied and alembicated correspondence we track him here and there, at Oxford or at Bath, studying architecture with my Lord Burlington and gardening with my Lord Bathurst or "beating the rounds" (probably only in metaphor) with wilder wits such as my Lord of Warwick and Holland. One of the prettiest of Pope's missives (some of them are not pretty) to "Mademoiselles de Maple-Durham," as he styles the Blounts, describes a visit he had paid to Queen Caroline's maids of honor at Hampton ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... except what is told us by the words or writings of prophets? And since there are, so far as I know, no prophets now alive, we have no alternative but to read the books of prophets departed, taking care the while not to reason from metaphor or to ascribe anything to our authors which they do not themselves distinctly state. I must further premise that the Jews never make any mention or account of secondary, or particular causes, but in a spirit of religion, piety, and what is commonly called ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... discountenance 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 patted or wreathed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... determined the general law of the variation of opinions, that it is the same in this nation as in an individual, I shall next endeavour to disentangle the final results attained, considering Greek philosophy as a whole. To return to the illustration, to us more than an empty metaphor, though in individual life there is a successive passage through infancy, childhood, youth, and manhood to old age, a passage in which the characteristics of each period in their turn disappear, yet, nevertheless, there are certain results in another sense ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most poets of powerful individuality, Donne lost precisely where he ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... herself, Beatrix laughed at the logical application of her metaphor. Stout, energetic Mrs. Stanley was so like a greedy young turkey snapping up the crumbs dropped from the hands ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... fine lines to cover a hundred feet of wall. They fill the blank spaces with their repeated detail; they make the style (which even in stone is full of chances and particular corners) most intricate, and—if one may use so exaggerated a metaphor—"populous." Above all, they lead the eye up and up, making a comparison and measure of their tiny bands until the domination of a buttress or a tower is exaggerated to the enormous. Now the belfry of Delft, though all the upper part is of stone, yet it stands on a great ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... here the felicity of the metaphor: the cloud rests, the air trembles and is soon shaken, the darkness runs over the ground, and the thunder growls in anger. Only the eye which sees at bottom life in Nature's forces could see them in ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... sympathies, without our knowing how or wherefore. Admitting, therefore, the corresponding instinct, or whatever else it may be called, to vary in men,—which there is no reason to doubt,—the solution of their unequal impression appears at once. Hence it would be no extravagant metaphor, should we affirm that some persons see more with their minds than others with their eyes. Nay, it must be obvious to all who are conversant with Art, that much, if not the greater part, in its higher branches is especially addressed to this mental vision. And it is very certain, if ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... nothing—it would not be worth writing about, save for another circumstance. In that same house ANOTHER person—a person of great wealth-may also have been dreaming of shoes; but, of shoes of a very different pattern and fashion (in a manner of speaking, if you understand my metaphor, we are all of us shoemakers). This, again, would be nothing, were it not that the rich person has no one to whisper in his ear: "Why dost thou think of such things? Why dost thou think of thyself alone, and live only for thyself—thou ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... laid aside, and my many pages of writing have been sent to their destination. What I undertook to do, is now done. To take a metaphor from the stage—the curtain falls here on the ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... When a man's down never hit 'im. 'Tisn't necessary. Give him a hand up. That's a metaphor I recommend to you in life. It's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the bank. He leaned on the cart wheel until he was able to stand. The help of Morse he brushed aside with a sputtered oath. His eyes never left the man who had beaten him. He snarled hike a whipped wolf. The hunter's metaphor had been an apt one. The horrible lust to kill was stamped on his distorted, grinning face, but for the present the will ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... Athens and Rome than from St. James's.—The varied and extended occupations of a maritime and commercial people have increased the fund from which imagery in discourse is drawn, and as all occupations in such a nation are deemed honorable, no metaphor is rejected as ignoble ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... ballad, and to break the secret of that ballad you have to take to yourself a dark lantern and a case of jemmies. I like him best in The Nuptials of Attila. If he always wrote as here, and were always as here sustained in inspiration, rapid of march, nervous of phrase, apt of metaphor, and moving in effect, he would be delightful to the general, and that without sacrificing on the vile and filthy altar of popularity. Here he is successfully himself, and what more is there to say? You clap for Harlequin, and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... here the New Testament officers only, ver. 28. 4. That in the visible Church now under the New Testament, there is a government settled; for besides Apostles, Prophets, and Teachers, here is mention of another sort of officer distinct from them all, called, in the abstract, Governments, a metaphor from pilots, mariners, or shipmasters, who by their helm, card, or compass, cables, and other tacklings, guide, and order, turn and twine the ship as necessity shall require; so these officers called Governments, have a power of governing and steering the spiritual vessel of the Church; thus, ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... round on p. 297 and praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out "the well-known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck"? The answer is not far to seek. It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at one and the ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... approaches to yours; and if you listen to us, we are sure, either by the sap or the mine, to succeed, and blow you up when ever we please, if we do but take care to suit ourselves to your particular foibles; or, to carry on the metaphor, point our batteries to your weak side—for the strongest fortresses, my dear, are weaker in one place than another."—"A fine thing, Sir," said I, "to be so learned a gentleman!"—"I wish, however," thought I, "you had always ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... death. Those who fought with beasts might in some cases be volunteers; in general they were captives or condemned criminals, and it perhaps hardly needs pointing out that, when St. Paul says he had "fought with beasts at Ephesus," he is merely speaking in metaphor adapted to the times. It was not intended that the criminal should escape death, but only that he should be able to make a fight for his life. Meanwhile the gladiators who fought with men and not with beasts were in the position of professionals, who ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time, they have been completely and professedly separated. Good histories, in the proper sense of the word, we have not. But we have good historical romances, and good historical essays. The imagination and the reason, if we may use a legal metaphor, have made partition of a province of literature of which they were formerly seized per my et per tout; and now they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of holding the whole ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Alexandrians should fear to fling a stone lest it might hit one of the good daemons of which the air was full—a spirit of light perhaps, or a protecting spirit. The more obscure their theories, the more were they overloaded with image and metaphor; all simplicity of statement was lost, and yet the disputants prided themselves on the brilliancy of their language and the wealth of their ideas. They believed that they had brought the transcendental within the grasp of intelligent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... she would answer, when he used this metaphor, "don't people sometimes like to go out and see the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... old forces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and Mediaeval England are still not only alive but lively; for real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of his home. The ancient English literature was like all the several literatures of Christendom, alike in its likeness, alike in its very unlikeness. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... number were of the same species. A device portraying an elephant, with a flock of sheep grazing quietly around, the motto, Infestus infestis (Hostile only to the wicked), was strictly correct, as the sheep, being all of one species, were recognised merely as one figure. Metaphor was not allowed in the motto: a device faulty in this respect, represented a ball of crystal, the motto, from Plautus, Intus et in cute (The same within and without); crystal being devoid of skin (cutis), ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... the Dominie, again abstracted, "the metaphor is not just. 'Life's dull stream.' 'Lethe tacitus amnis,' as Lucan hath it; but the stream of life flows—ay, flows rapidly—even in my veins. Doth not the heart throb and beat—yea, strongly—peradventure too forcibly against my better judgment? 'Confiteor ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... haphazard and indiscriminate way, quite regardless of any meaning, in which he interlards ordinary sentences with beastly words, at first revolts you. Lying he treats with the same large charity. To lie like a trooper is quite a sound metaphor. He invents all sorts of elaborate lies for the mere pleasure of inventing them. He will come back from headquarters and tell you of the last despatch which he has just read with his own eyes (a victory or disaster, according to his mood at the moment), with all kinds ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... weeks at Little Primpton; he announced that since Jamie's wedding was so near he would stay till it was over. Finding also that his nephew had not thought of a best man, he offered himself; he had acted as such many times—at the most genteel functions; and with a pleasant confusion of metaphor, assured James that he knew the ropes right down ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... analogies beyond their legitimate application 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 ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... been a careful and cautious exchange of subtlest metaphor between this proud and sensitive Mohican and me; I striving to win him to our cause by recalling the ancient greatness and the proud freedom of his tribe, yet most carefully avoiding undue pressure or any ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... sticking up all over his head, and his breath coming and going very hard and short, the busy Pancks fell back a step (in Tug metaphor, took half a turn astern) as if to show his dingy hull complete, then forged a-head again, and directed his quick glance by turns into his hat where his note-book was, and ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... wrote to mother I kept hinting that the glories of Bellaire were actually taking root in my soul," said Cleo, as the girl dressed next morning, almost unconscious of the task they were performing. "Now she will understand the metaphor." ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the parable in ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... can tell where Brixton is on the way home. I do not even mind whether they can put two and two together in the mathematical sense; I am content if they can put two and two together in the metaphorical sense. But all this longer statement of an obvious view comes back to the metaphor I have employed. I do not care a dump whether they know the alphabet, so long as ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... that stars of this kind, so frequently spoken of in history, and so well known as a metaphor in language, are a common hallucination of the insane. Brierre de Boismont has a chapter on the stars of great men. I cannot doubt that visions of this description were in some cases the basis of that firm belief in astrology, which ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... application floated about her on a ripple of unintelligent laughter. A phrase of Mr. Dale's recurred to her mind, "Hock and seltzer with the sparkle out of it;" so he had stigmatised the style and she sadly thanked him for the metaphor. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... articulated with a higher unity, a more comprehensive system of consciousness? Are the separate heavenly bodies, to start with, bearers of a unified inner life? Are the stars, is the earth an animated being? The poets speak of the earth-spirit; is that more than a poetic metaphor? The Greek philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, speak of astral spirits; is that more than the last reflection of a ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... last twenty years. Cast your eye back over the theatrical record of Calcutta for that space of time, and you yourselves will admit that there has been nobody that could be said to have come within a mile of her shadow, if I may use the language of metaphor." (Applause, led by Mr. Fillimore.) "I would ask you to remember, at the same time, that this pleasure has been of a superior class. I freely admit that this is a great satisfaction to me personally. Far ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... their matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and tremble, because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for breakfast. However, that morning he did not eat the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to carry on the metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and—ah! ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... "Metaphor and simile apart, there is work for a twelve-month to any man to read such a book, and for half a lifetime to digest it, and I am glad to see it brought ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... a child's copy-book an essay on the sea, four words and a full stop—'The sea is large'—and whenever I attempt a description, I am obliged to confess that I can do no better than the child." The fact is, the sea describes us; that is why we cannot describe it. It is, itself, language and metaphor for the telling of our own longings and our own mysteries. In the sound of the waves is only the song of man's life; in the endless variety of its appearance only the story ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... symbol or metaphor, is of frequent occurrence and varied import in Scripture. Among its diversified significations, perhaps that of a destructive element is most common. (Ps. xviii. 4; xxxii. 6.) It is indeed often used to denote gospel blessings, (as Is. lv. 1; John vii. ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... closer 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 reflection found its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... He sat up and frowned. "There you step on one of my corns, Doctor"—he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor—"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that. It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... all strength, all hope. Her one raison d'etre was to be removed, her single prop drawn from her. Therefore she fell, quietly, with scarcely a word of protest, only an instant of tottering. This the metaphor. To speak plainly, so complete was her desolation that, outwardly, she betrayed nothing. Ivan was drawn to wonder at it; but he left her, perhaps, with the less anxiety, being too inexperienced in the ways of grief to worry as a woman might have done over this attitude towards their parting. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... of God was developed into something between a poetical image and a separate power. Again the development starts from a Biblical metaphor. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens created, and all their host by the breath of His mouth" (Ps. xxxiii). "God of our Fathers and Lord of Mercy, who didst make all things by Thy word," says the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon. Inspired again by the phrase of the Psalmist, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... which, as every body knows, distinguish your social character; nothing is said of the annual meeting of chemists, geologists, and mathematicians, so beneficial to the real interests of science, by making a turn for tumid metaphor and the love of display necessary ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of Newton,—and turning the newly discovered joint of an antediluvian reptile into a theme of perennial and ambitious declamation; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Cross: however young, strong, proud, gallant, gifted, ambitious you may be- -sit down at the foot of Christ's Cross, and look thereon, till you see what it means, and must mean for ever. See how he nailed to that Cross, not in empty metaphor but in literal fact, in agonising soul and body, all of human nature which the world admires—youth, grace, valour, power, eloquence, intellect: not because they were evil, for he possessed them doubtless himself as did none other of the sons ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... popular, because it describes feelings, passions, and associations, which all have felt, and with which all can sympathize. It is by no means rich in metaphor, nor does it evince great powers of imagination; but it is pathetic, plaintive, and agreeable; and emanating directly from his own heart, it appeals irresistibly to that of his reader. His meaning is always clear, and the force and vigour of his expressions are remarkable. ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... would be very obscure to the reader without an explanation from another of Cicero's treatises. The expression here, ad investigandum suem regiones vineae terminavit, which is a metaphor too bold, if it was not a sort of augural language, seems to me to have been the effect of carelessness in our great author; for Navius did not divide the regions, as he calls them, of the vine to find his sow, but to find ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... picked up this eccentric metaphor I know not. She had many odd turns of language as yet not current among the fashionable classes. I gravely assured her that I was not sarcastic. I ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... and Greeley fairly in the field, the country entered upon a remarkable canvass. At the beginning of the picturesque and emotional "log cabin canvass of 1840," Mr. Van Buren, with his keen insight into popular movements, had said, in somewhat mixed metaphor, that it would be "either a farce or a tornado." The present canvass gave promise on different grounds of similar alternatives. General Grant had been tried, and with him the country knew what to expect. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... out to the last; to wit, a country farmer's daughter, named Betty Aikins, Dora M'Mahon, Hanna Cavanagh, and a servant-girl belonging to another neighbor, named Peggy Bailly. This ruck, as they say on the turf, was pretty well up together, but all the rest nowhere. And now, to continue the metaphor, as is the case at Goodwood or the Curragh, the whole interest was centered upon these four. At the commencement of the last hour the state of the case was proclaimed as follows: Betty Aikins, three dozen ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... of symbolism—almost kaleidoscopic in its manifold beauty—surrounds the Menorah in Hebraic literature and tradition. Both the single light or candle, and the distinctive combination of seven, are the favorite objects of metaphor, interpretation, and poetic sentiment. In the Bible the word "ner" ([Hebrew: nun-resh; Transliteration: ner])—candle or light, embodied, of course, in the word Menorah ([Hebrew: mem-nun-vav-resh-hey; Transliteration: menorah])—is used metaphorically ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an Englishman ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... age (however astonishing it may appear), it is the boast, the pride, the glory of our present orators, that their periods are musical enough either for the dancer's heel [e], or the warbler's throat. Hence it is, that by a frequent, but preposterous, metaphor, the orator is said to speak in melodious cadence, and the dancer to move with expression. In this view of things, even [f] Cassius Severus (the only modern whom Aper has ventured to name), if we compare him with the race that followed, may be ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... as if they were sentient beings acting under the will of a sovereign. Parts of pure matter—the chemical elements, for instance—do not act at all; being brute and inert, it is only by a strong metaphor that they are said to be subject to law. Again, we attribute force, power, &c., to the primitive particles of matter, and speak of their natural agencies. Just so, we talk of tone in coloring, and of a heavy or light sound; though, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... was 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 a little slip of a girl with hair of gold and sapphire ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... 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 effect, on the ground that beauty demands ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... realised at the moment that I was talking to you, is this. We are living the kind of life comparable to that of the people whose cottages are built round the edge of the crater of an active volcano, liable to erupt at any moment; or, to change the metaphor, our position bears a certain resemblance to that of the careless workman who smokes a pipe on the top of a barrel of blasting powder, and if we're not extremely careful we'll find ourselves scattered about in little bits, ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... must always be either (1) the ordinary word for the thing, or (2) a strange word, or (3) a metaphor, or (4) an ornamental word, or (5) a coined word, or (6) a word lengthened out, or (7) curtailed, or (8) altered in form. By the ordinary word I mean that in general use in a country; and by a strange ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... in some sense, is said to be jealous, [5991]"I am a jealous God, and will visit:" so Psalm lxxix. 5. "Shall thy jealousy burn like fire for ever?" But these are improperly called jealousies, and by a metaphor, to show the care and solicitude they have of them. Although some jealousies express all the symptoms of this which we treat of, fear, sorrow, anguish, anxiety, suspicion, hatred, &c., the object only varied. That of some fathers is very ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... wear it out, or make it sit easier on his shoulders. My metaphor brings me to my story. Having nothing to carry with him beside an empty valise, he resolved on filling it with something, however worthless, lest, seeing his utter destitution, and hopeless of payment, a receiver of lodgers should refuse to admit him into the hostelry. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... that hath no earthly metaphor, A blinding word that hath no earthly rhyme, Love! we can only call and no name more; As the great lonely thunder rolls sublime, As the great sun doth solitary climb, And we have but themselves to know them by, Just so Love stands a stranger amid Time: The god is there, the great voice speaks ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... ideas of God into one focus. It was an attempt 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
... fragment asserting, with vivid metaphor, at the same time the fragility of man's frame and the majesty of man's nature. This is ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... stand." He 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 ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... and will go to the dairy for himself. Him will the several traders declare to have no milk at all. They will bring their own wares, and challenge a trial: they want nothing but to name the judges. To vary the metaphor, those who have looked at Christianity in open day, know that all who see it through painted windows shut out much of the light of heaven and color the rest; it matters nothing that the stains are shaped into what are meant for ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the Indian dialects, is the abundant use which they allow of figurative language, a result of their total want of terms expressive of abstract, and purely spiritual ideas. To clothe these in words, they must have recourse to figures, chiefly metaphor and allegory, hence arises so much of what an American writer calls "the picturesque brilliancy" of the savage tongues. To express the term "prosperity," for example, the Indian will employ the image of a bright sun, a cloudless sky, or ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... forbidding of countenance, and did not wear his excellent heart upon his sleeve. There were few surface indications of the gold that was in him. Dora was not long, however, in finding the auriferous vein; and, to drop metaphor, she soon became conscious of a very warm sentiment of gratitude growing up in her heart toward her uncouth guide, philosopher ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... isolate the moral law, as I shall show more clearly hereafter, from any law or force in the universe that may be wider and more permanent. When the individual dies, he can only be said to live by metaphor, in the results of his outward actions. When the race dies, in no thinkable way can we say that it will live at all. Everything will then be as though it never had been. Whatever humanity may have done before ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Exodus, (24) "et quasi signum in manu tua," as that passage does not treat of chiromancy, but of the festival of unleavened bread; the observance of which, in order that it might be memorable to the Hebrews, the sacred historian said should be as a sign upon the hand; a metaphor derived from those who, when they wish to remember anything, tie a thread round their finger, or put a ring upon it; and still less I ween does that chapter of Job (25) speak in their favour, where is written, "Qui in manu ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... your metaphor stink, I will stop my nose; or against any man's metaphor. Pr'ythee, ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... 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 to barrack and from garrison ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... dispenses with any need for thinking on the part of the author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of life; and turn from them to the modern novel, composed of scenery and word-pictures and metaphor and the dramatic situations, of which Scott is full. Invention may be displayed in such work, but there is no room for anything else. 'The romance after the manner of Scott is a mere passing fashion in literature,' you will say, and fulminate against the fatal way in which ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... then exercised alike by sea and by land, proceeded from that night, in which Pelopidas not surprising any fort, or castle, or citadel, but coming, the twelfth man, to a private house, loosed and broke, if we may speak truth in metaphor, the chains of the Spartan sway, which before ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough |
