"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... empty, whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum. Save when he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook, vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his vision all concentrate ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor was still good enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... but to renew their adhesion to the 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 ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... Reformation period Knowledge gained by the experiment comes before explanation JESUS TO BE KNOWN BY WHAT HE DOES The forgiveness of sin, and the theories to explain it Is a Theology of Redemption possible which shall not be mainly metaphor or simile? THE PROBLEM OF THE INCARNATION The approach is to be "a posterioria" In fact, God and man are only known to us in and by Jesus Only in Christ is the love of God as taught in N.T. tenable To know Jesus in what he can do, is antecedent ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... For the father of the family had lately been made president of a small bank, and was fairly boxing the social compass in search of depositors. Marguerite had not yet discovered that—if we may drag the metaphor ashore—to enter society is not to emerge upon an unbroken table-land, or that she was not on its highest plateau. She noticed the frequency with which she encountered unaccomplished fathers, stupid ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... 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
... literature is more truly American,—unless it be that other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... in due course to be granted, reached a certain level of wealth and population they would demand and receive their independence. That the fruit would fall off the old tree as soon as it was ripe was the favourite metaphor employed to convey what nearly all publicists took to be an obvious truth. No one stated it so trenchantly as Disraeli when he wrote: "These wretched Colonies will all be independent too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks;" but the dogma was generally accepted by politicians ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact; and the groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon,—so long there was no science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps reverence, but no science. As soon, however, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing 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 the dream is undisturbed. The distant sound of a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Suppose she had only four or five hundred a year? Oh, probably more than that, seeing that she could economise such substantial sums. He was saved; the sun would rise for him, literally and in metaphor. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... wofully prone. They commit it with glee, and I have often found it a most difficult matter to make them realise the absurdities which result from the practice of it. As an illustration of the ludicrous consequences of unbridled indulgence in metaphor and simile, I quote the following extract (not, however, the work of a woman) from a serious and justly ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... artist is given in order that he may reveal as yet unrealized spiritual relations, or new beauty. The workaday world with its burden of exigent "realities" has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God. In the realm of thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision, must come to restore his fellows to their birthright, which is the life of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not easily pass the obvious and immediate. ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... by false bonds, and afterwards attempted to cover it by the cobwebs of the law, then my Lord Coke would have trespassed a great deal more against decorum than against propriety of similitude and metaphor. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... opinion, which compelled him to range himself on the side of peace and union. In the whimsical imagery of the narrative, which some of the story-tellers, after their usual fashion, have converted from a metaphor to a fact, Hiawatha "combed the snakes out of the head" of his great antagonist, and presented him to the Council changed and restored to ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... she'd find it out before she got through with me. I assured her that I understood the beauty of righteousness, and that I held a strong hand—a straight flush, as it were. I was well aware that the metaphor was somewhat mixed; but it expressed my sentiments and relieved my feelings, and so I fired it at her point-blank. She snorted and pawed and bellowed, and swore at me in cow-language, but I didn't care for that. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... be described as Narrative pieces, in which the writers tell what they have to say in a simple, straightforward manner, without any hidden meaning reserved in the mind. The metaphor and other figures of speech enter into their composition as freely as in descriptive poems in any ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... swift stiletto, and Barrett, with his brutal bludgeon—to use a metaphor of "terror"—had each delivered an attack; and in 1818, if we may judge by Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, there is a change of fashion in fiction. How far this change is due to the satirists it is impossible ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... knowledge 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 godliness, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... various kinds, used to illustrate the subjects to which they are applied.—They embrace the Simile, Metaphor, Prosopopoeia, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... times did Ernest Hyde and I Argue about the freedom of the will. My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow Roped out to grass, and free you know as far As the length of the rope. One day while arguing so, watching the cow Pull at the rope to get beyond the circle Which she had eaten bare, Out came the stake, and tossing up her head, She ran for us. "What's that, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... establishing property, has not been the expression of a psychological fact, the development of a natural law, the application of a moral principle. It has literally CREATED a right outside of its own province. It has realized an abstraction, a metaphor, a fiction; and that without deigning to look at the consequences, without considering the disadvantages, without inquiring whether it was right ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 circumstance to rest their feet ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Pocock; he could have talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She HAD been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... existences are but the last of an 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 that definite order itself. Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not the question. No one ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... precisely the word, my lord,' said Trombin, desisting from picking the leg of a quail, and staring intently at the masked Senator. 'It is, as I may say, a false metaphor, which is an outrage upon elegant speech—forgive me for borrowing your ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... a friend of the Reformation, and in every respect one of the most excellent princes who ever took upon himself the responsibility of directing the destinies of a nation; to use Schaffarik's happy metaphor, the benefits of his administration fell on the field, which Ferdinand's strength had ploughed, like a mild and fertilizing rain. During his life, and the first ten years of his son Rudolph's reign, Bohemia was in peace: the different denominations were indulged; literature flourished, and the Bohemian ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... over the tree downwards, beginning with the feathery crests, then lighting up the scales of the trunk, and descending lower and lower till the whole palm is literally bathing in a sea of light. Without any metaphor the surface of the leaves seems to tremble in liquid silver all the night long, whereas their under surfaces seem blacker and softer than black velvet. But woe to the thoughtless novice, woe to the mortal who gazes at the Indian moon with his ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Miss RHODA BROUGHTON has not thought fit to publish her total fictional tonnage (if without disrespect I may employ a metaphor of the moment) on the title-page of her latest volume. Certainly the tale of her output must by this time reach impressive dimensions. And the wonder is that A Thorn in the Flesh (STANLEY PAUL) betrays absolutely no evidence of staleness. If the outlook ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... councillors, named Magadar, sprang to his feet. He was unusually excitable for an Indian. Indeed, he differed a good deal from his companions in other respects, being passionate, impulsive, hasty, and matter-of-fact; in his speech-making too he scorned the use of symbol and metaphor, but went straight to the point at once in the simplest and most ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... metaphor, unless indeed thou dost allude to the colour of her hair!" She spoke with so much malice and hate Lord Cedric was stirred to amazement, and for the first time his eyes were opened to Constance' hate of one whom he loved ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... getting the better of years of social discipline, had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE without a trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement which his speedy despatch had caused among her friends; and though later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream, it was only in fleeting glimpses, with long ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... with his blonde head, which the dampness had merely made to wave a little more, for his thickly plaited straw hat had somewhat protected it from a thorough wetting, she might even have called him a young Viking, without any very great misuse of metaphor; Timothy was so thoroughly of the outdoors in his appearance, with ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... use 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 sort. Burke, in his Speech on Conciliation, says, "Despotism itself ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... home, who enlargeth his desire as hell, and cannot be satisfied,—Shall not all these take up a parable against him, and a taunting proverb against him, and say, 'Woe to him that increaseth that which is not his: and to him that ladeth himself with thick clay'?" (What a glorious history in one metaphor, of the life of a man greedy of fortune!) "Woe to him that coveteth an evil covetousness that he may set his nest on high. Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity. Behold, is it not of the Lord ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... friend, as I think he is, Mr. Horne, is often forced to entreat me into patience and coolness of purpose, though his only intercourse with me has been by letter. And, by the way, you will be sorry to hear that during his stay in Germany he has been 'headlong' (out of a metaphor) twice; once, in falling from the Drachenfels, when he only just saved himself by catching at a vine; and once quite lately, at Christmas, in a fall on the ice of the Elbe in skating, when he dislocated his left shoulder in a very painful manner. He is doing quite ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... The metaphor is of an anthem or madrigal, say in four parts. We will suppose the Hostess of the 'Garter' is taking the Cantus, a tapster the Altus, mine Host the Tenor, and Nym the Bassus. The three former are all hard at ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... enough), are an allegory on the metaphysical speculations which do not rest on the ground of experience, but float about without any definite shape or body, in the region of possibilities. We may observe in general that it is one of the peculiarities of the wit of Aristophanes to take a metaphor literally, and to exhibit it in this light before the eyes of the spectators. Of a man addicted to unintelligible reveries, it is a common way of speaking to say that he is up in the clouds, and accordingly Socrates makes his first appearance actually ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... 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 ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... nor is it possible to imagine greater degradation, or punishment more capricious, than of the unfortunate person subject to such taskmasters; in whose hands, according to the custom of early times, the rod of authority was not a metaphor.[83] ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... form to say that we can only achieve inner unity by transcending mere individuality. The independent, impervious self shows its unreality by being inwardly discordant. It is of no use to enlarge the circumference of our life, if the fixed centre is always the ego. There are, if I may press the metaphor, other circles with other centres, in which we are vitally involved. And thus sympathy, or love, which is sympathy in its highest power, is the great atoner, within as well as without. The old Pythagorean maxim, that "a man must be one,[53]" is echoed by all the mystics. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... play of metaphor, appropriate though it be when facing the visions of political theorists. Let us look earnestly and clearly at the positive facts before us. We are gravely told that to grant the suffrage to woman would be a step ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... kind. They say that while all hands were below deck mending sails, splicing ropes, and every one at his own business, and the captain in his cabin attending to his log-book and chart, a rogue of a pilot has run them into an enemy's port. But metaphor apart, there is much dissatisfaction with Mr. Jay and his treaty. For my part, I consider myself now but as a passenger, leaving the world and its government to those who are likely to live longer ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... spirit of my son cries for vengeance. It must be appeased. His bones lie on the ground uncovered. We want ammunition: give us powder and ball, and we will go and revenge his death upon our enemies.' Their public speeches are full of bold metaphor, energy and pathos. "No Greek or Roman orator ever spoke perhaps with more strength and sublimity than one of their chiefs when asked to remove with his tribe to a distance from their native soil." 'We were born,' said he, 'on this ground, our fathers lie ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... is conceived as a bird ready to take flight. This conception has probably left traces in most languages, and it lingers as a metaphor in poetry. The Malays carry out the conception of the bird-soul in a number of odd ways. If the soul is a bird on the wing, it may be attracted by rice, and so either prevented from flying away or lured back ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... is stifled by the humdrum life at Norton with her aunts, how she leaves them to wring from life a measure of individual freedom and happiness, and how she finds both, only to end once more where she began. To use a metaphor from music, her life is a piece marked "Da capo." BLINDFOLDED is by far the best novel Miss Rogers has yet written, a book full of truth ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... more fully given in the Origin, Ed. i. p. 310, vi. p. 452. "For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... extinguish it. But I am anxious, I confess, to temper it; for in colour, to my taste, it is a little ghastly; and I fear that if it increased in intensity, it might even become too hot, though I do not suggest that that is a present danger. To drop the metaphor, my objections to collectivism are not as fundamental as my objections to anarchy, nor are they based upon any lack of appreciation of the advantages of that more equitable distribution of the opportunities of life which ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... so much as laziness. It was with him the unpardonable sin. There was toleration, forgiveness for every one but the sluggard. He said Solomon's description of the slothful should be written in letters of gold on the walls of the understanding. He explained it to them as a metaphor, and made them to understand that the field of the sluggard, overgrown with thorns and nettles, was only an image of the neglected and uncultivated mind. He gave them Doctor Watts' versification of it to commit to memory, and repeated it with them in concert. It is ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography." His ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called Saintsburyese—not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor: ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the prison which Christianity had built around the human mind. It was not indeed inactive, but its activity took the form of heresy; or, to pursue the metaphor, those who broke chains were unable for the most part to scale the walls of the prison; their freedom extended only so far as to arrive at beliefs, which, like orthodoxy itself, were based on Christian ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... steeple chase, Rookwood church being the mark, a "do" at a leap, or some such trifle, to which the most scrupulous could not raise an objection, Dick was all fair and above-board. But when poor Sir Piers had "put on his wooden surtout," to use Dick's own expressive metaphor, his conscientious scruples evaporated into thin air. Lady Rookwood was nothing to him; there was excellent ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... agricultural metaphor not in ignorance; for I have, out on these very prairies, read between corn-husking and the spring ploughing Virgil's Georgics and Bucolics, for which Varro's treatises furnished the foundations. And I have also, on ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... in theology. Even so orthodox a divine as Dr. Vaughan laid it down that "Nothing in the Church's history has been more fertile in discord and error than the tendency of theologians to stereotype metaphor."[49] Bishop Hampden's much-criticised Bampton Lectures had merely aimed at stating the accepted doctrines in terms other than those derived from schoolmen and mataphysicians. Dean Stanley's unrivalled powers of literary exposition ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... 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), the expression was metaphorical. The introduction of negatives into the motto was ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... feelings to God must be understood as metaphors. It is a psychological necessity for man wishing to communicate his ideas to other men to speak in human terms, whether he speak of beings and things inferior or superior to him. The result is that the metaphor he finds it necessary to employ either raises or lowers the object to which it refers. It elevates the sub-human and lowers the superhuman to the human. This is the explanation of such phrases as "the mouth of the earth" the ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the form of man. It was perhaps thus secured that stock and graft, if I may venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary affinity, and be capable of being united in a single person. The false gods of the Egyptians assumed, it was fabled, the forms of brutes: it was the human form and nature that was assumed by the true God;—so far as we know, the only form and nature ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They were handsome girls, had the fresh color of their country up-bringing, and in their eyes that brilliancy which is called,—by no metaphor, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... But metaphor, however poetic, never slaked a dry throat. To enjoy Caprona's romantic suggestions we must have water, and so we came in close, always sounding, and skirted the shore. As close in as we dared cruise, we found fathomless depths, and always ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... purely in metaphor," said I with a sickly smile. "To me a nasturtium by the river brink is more than a simple flower. It is a broader, grander, more magnificent, more stupendous symbol. It may mean anything, everything—such as sunsets and conflagrations and Goetterdaemmerungs! Or—" and my voice was subtly ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... says Carlyle in "Past and Present," "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 ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... only increased one fourth, prices would rise one fourth. There would be one fourth more money, all of which would be used to purchase goods of some description. When there had been time for the increased supply of money to reach all markets, or (according to the conventional metaphor) to permeate all the channels of circulation, all prices would have risen one fourth. But the general rise of price is independent of this diffusing and equalizing process. Even if some prices were raised more, and others less, the average ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... Beyond this the capital of the kingdom, the eye of the monarch was arrested by another bright brass funnel, which was the chimney of the galley-fire, and indicated the exact position of the abode of the crew, or—to continue our metaphor—the populace, who, however, required no such indicator to tell of their existence or locality, for the chorus of a "nigger" melody burst from them, ever and anon, through every opening in the decks, with jovial violence, as they sat, busily engaged on various pieces ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... is dead in earnest as you know and now that he is elected he is going to make the machine, whatever that is, 'sit up and take notice.' This is what my teacher in English would call a disjointed metaphor. ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... lion-hearted king—such a sin was self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then, by that consummation, he caused her to fulfill the functions of her nature; he compelled her to exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere fmina for the perfections of a mulier. And, metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the spirit of her institutions—that which, by her very corruptions and abuses co-operating with her laws, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... what's the use, too!" whined Dolph. "You can't row a biskit across a puddle of molasses with a couple of toothpicks," he added, with cook's metaphor for the absolutely hopeless. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and untried man. Honour forced me to fight, but nothing forced me to hate, and I asked no better than that we should both escape with as little hurt as the laws of the game allowed. His mood was different; he had been bearded, and was in a mind to give my beard a pull—I speak in a metaphor, for beard had I none—and possessing some reputation as a swordsman, he could not well afford to let me go untouched. An old sergeant of General Cromwell's, resident at Norwich, had instructed me in the use of the foils, but I was not my lord's equal, and I set it ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... 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 seemed ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the metaphor of its name throughout, is divided into 4 sakhas or 'branches,' and each of these into 8 or 10 pallabas or smaller branches, 'boughs.' It should be explained that the kirtans are celebrated with considerable ceremony. ...
— Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal • John Beames
... nothing but what his reason can comprehend, and to act only upon evidence which amounts to certainly, the same paradox is true; for when there is no reason to doubt, there can be none to believe. Faith ever stands between conflicting probabilities; but her position is (if we may use the metaphor) the centre of gravity between them, and will be proportionally nearer the greater ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... preparation which will prove, with God's grace, the surest preventive of, or antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargising hemlock, of the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our minds the historical fact of our Lord's crucifixion; in short—(the profaneness is with them, not with me)—just the same as when Protestants ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shut down "as dark as a wolf's mouth,"—to use the skipper's own metaphor; and the chief mate took the first watch, with ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... sir, if your Metaphor stinke, I will stop my nose, or against any mans Metaphor. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... many Englishmen who think that when they show that Grattan's Parliament was a venal and somewhat disorderly body, which occasionally indulged in mixed metaphor, they have proved the impossibility of giving Ireland a Parliament now. But then, as they are obliged to admit, Walpole's Parliament was very corrupt, and no one would say that for that reason it would have been wise to suspend ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... control the destinies of civilisation Great Britain is at once the freest, the largest, and the most various. If the State is a "cauldron" for mingling "the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity" of the portions of mankind—or if, to use an apter metaphor, it is a body whose perfection consists in the very variety of the functions of its several members—there has never been on the earth a political organism like the British Empire. Its 433 million ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... 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. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... labourers trying to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor, and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing circumspection which ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the people of Dry Bottom he had announced in a quiet, unostentatious paragraph that while he had not come to Dry Bottom for a free fight, he would permit no one to tread on his toes. His readers' comprehension of the metaphor was complete—as was evidenced by the warm hand-clasps which he received from citizens who were not in sympathy with the Dunlavey regime. It surprised him to find how many such there were in town. He was convinced that all this element needed was a leader and he ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... 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 by which, after his father's death, the law secures ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... is such a thing as a Religion of Humanity, because we may begin by deifying Humanity in our own estimation, and then go on to worship our ideal. But by thus giving Humanity the name of Deity we are not really creating a new religion: we are merely using a metaphor, which may or may not be successful as a matter of poetic diction, but which most assuredly presents no shred of value as a matter of philosophical statement. Indeed, in this relation it is worse than valueless: it is misleading. Variations or reversals in the meanings of words are not ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... rapture at sunrise; and the picture of a sunset at the close of the same book. Such is the opening of Book IV; and the passage describing the wild joy of roaming through a mountain storm; and the metaphor in the same book which compares the mind's power of transfiguring the obstacles which beset her, with the glory into which the moon incorporates the umbrage that would intercept ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... suppose such an allusion in order either to explain or to give picturesque force to the words. It is a most natural thing, as all languages show, to talk of a man's lot, either of sorrow or joy, as the cup which he has to drink; and there are numerous instances of the metaphor in the Psalms, such as 'Thou art the Portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, Thou maintainest my lot.' 'My cup runneth over.' That familiar emblem is all that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... poem on the South Sea mania. That which was written in 1721, and is called "South Sea," is a wonder of wit and wisdom. It shows the hollowness of the scheme in some new, odd, and striking light in every metaphor and every verse. "A guinea," Swift reminds his readers, "will not pass at market for a farthing more, shown through a multiplying glass, than what it always ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... are the two principal engines by which our sex make their first 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
... sincerity—the evidence of the literary exercise—injures Hall's satirical work in different ways throughout. We do not, as we read him, in the least believe in his attitude of Hebrew prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief. Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist—a writer who took some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a whole one ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nutshell (a cocoanut 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... is derived rather from 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
... very clear to me; but I became aware that my life in heaven—I will call it heaven for want of a better name—was my real continuous life, my home-life, so to speak, while my earthly lives had been, to pursue the metaphor, like terms which a boy spends at school, in which he is aware that he not only learns definite and tangible things, but that his character is hardened and consolidated by coming into contact with the rougher ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... like a rocket, he would fall like a stick," is a metaphor which I applied to Mr. Deane, in the first piece which I published respecting him, and he has exactly fulfilled the description. The credit he so unjustly obtained from the public, he lost in almost as short a time. The delusion perished ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... say that the professional politicians are still made to "fill the stage." That metaphor is false, because upon a stage the audience knows that it is all play-acting, and actually ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... come thou day in night!" expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration for her lover, which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only Juliet could or would have expressed it,—in a bold and beautiful metaphor. Let it be remembered, that, in this speech, Juliet is not supposed to be addressing an audience, nor even a confidante; and I confess I have been shocked at the utter want of taste and refinement in those who, with coarse derision, or in a spirit of prudery, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... entertained by some of the Christians of the first three centuries toward the pagan empire of Rome. To these fanatics the government of the orthodox czars came to be the reign of Satan and the dominion of Antichrist. Nor was this an empty metaphor: it was a clear, determined conviction, and it still exerts a strong religious and political influence upon the schism. The Raskolniks could see but one interpretation of the overturning of public and private order under Peter the Great, and for what ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... 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 ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... writes in the Autobiography, "is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, 'You are an angel'; which I was disposed to accept without metaphor. She is now living in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... treasures shall be exhausted by unparalleled depredations, and that its indigence 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes obtains a lurid and ghastly tragic intensity which more than equals Ford when at his best; and Marston, in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes has touches of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings of metaphor worthy of Webster. But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Gourlay was aware of his uncanny gift of visualization—or of "seeing things in the inside of his head," as he called it—and vanity prompted the inference, that this was the faculty that sprang the metaphor. His theory was now clear and eloquent before him. He was realizing for the first time in his life (with a sudden joy in the discovery) the effect of whisky to unloose the brain; sentences went hurling ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... My text gives us the reason. 'You cannot bear them now.' Now the word rendered 'bear' here does not mean 'bear' in the sense of endure, or tolerate, or suffer, but 'bear' in the sense of carry. And the metaphor is that of some weight—it may be gold, but still it is a weight—laid upon a man whose muscles are not strong enough to sustain it. It crushes rather than gladdens. So because they had not strength enough to carry, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... what metaphor is in speech. It is the representation to the eye of an object which ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... gazing abstractedly out the window, "of 'winter lingering in the lap of spring,' though the metaphor is not in the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... instances of a motive, to conclude concerning its true character, inasmuch as one, as it were, completes in accordance with their original tendency the lines of increasing distinctness in the different examples, and thus—to continue the geometric metaphor—one obtains in their prolongations a point of intersection in which can be recognized the goal of the process toward which the dream strives, a goal, however, that is not found in the dream itself but ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Western front continue cheerful, but it does not need much reading between the lines to realise the odds with which our officers and men have to contend, the endless discomfort and unending din. They are masters of a gallant art of metaphor which belittles the most appalling horrors of trench warfare; masters, too, of the art of extracting humorous relief from ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... life as eternal, but who does not, therefore, esteem his visible life as eternal in the same sense, may perhaps have a heaven, and in this his fatherland, but here on earth he has no fatherland; for this also is seen only under the metaphor of eternity and, indeed, of visible eternity, rendered perceptible to the senses; moreover, he cannot, therefore, love his fatherland. If such a man has none, he is to be pitied; but he to whom ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... personal quality, and if a man has it, whatever his hand touches will bear the trace of his power, an undying odour, an unfading radiance. When Rossetti wrote 'Beauty like hers is genius,' he was not dealing in metaphor, and Meissonier should have abolished for ever the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the title-page of which was written "Impressions on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H. Kennedy." The pages of that book were like a battlefield; the laboring author had fallen back from metaphor after metaphor, abandoned position after position. He would have admitted that the art of forging metals was nothing to this treacherous business of recording impressions, in which the material you were so full of vanished mysteriously under your striving hand. "Escaping ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... leave to correct the expression of your metaphor," said Mr. Silton: "that is not always rust which is acquired by the inactivity of the body on which it preys; such, perhaps, is the case with me, though indeed I was never cleared from my youth; but (taking it in its first stage) it is rather an encrustation, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... 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 be found in the invisible. That ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... have found this beautiful metaphor both in Gypsy and Spanish; it runs thus in the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Rose Bradwardine—sweet Scotch Rose! The last scene between Flora and Waverley is highly pathetic—my brother wishes that bridal garment were shroud: because when the heart is touched we seldom use metaphor, or quaint ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Ferrand's metaphor, a human body, living, but with all its channels of sensation hitherto unopened. Open the sense of sight to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again. Apparently, whenever the mind informing this body had the conception ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 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 from the possession of a parent to the possession of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... without much repugnance. Having thus procured the body of justice, they proceeded," continued Miss Vernon, "to attach to it a clerk, by way of soul, to direct and animate its movements. Accordingly they got a sharp Newcastle attorney, called Jobson, who, to vary my metaphor, finds it a good thing enough to retail justice at the sign of Squire Inglewood, and, as his own emoluments depend on the quantity of business which he transacts, he hooks in his principal for a great deal more employment ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the statement of the assumption (of a metaphor) there is nothing contrary to reason (in aja denoting the causal matter); just as in the case of honey (denoting the sun) and ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... 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. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... services was wholly unexpected by the Indian, who was talking to him that minute, caressing and speaking to him, as if human blood flowed in the veins of the proud creature. Then turning to Paganel, he pointed to Robert, and said, "A brave!" and employing the Indian metaphor, he added, "his spurs ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in each interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quick jig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating that ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... To drop metaphor, while nominally investigating a particular problem of ancient mythology, I have really been discussing questions of more general interest which concern the gradual evolution of human thought from savagery to civilization. The enquiry is beset with difficulties ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... given the exact force of the original, though the metaphor there is from a gang of slaves, where the best-looking is placed in front to carry off the rest. This interpretation, which the phrase "ducere familiam" seems to place beyond doubt, is as old as Torrentius: but the commentators in general reject ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... me, "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 own exact memory ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the risk, Myra? You have been playing with fire, and the dice are loaded against you. That is an Irishism and a mixed metaphor, I suppose, but you know what I mean. If you lose your heart to Don Carlos de Ruiz, you lose Antony Standish, and if you subsequently discover Don Carlos is not in earnest you will be left broken-hearted, humiliated, and with your matrimonial ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... see you take my metaphor. You are a painter; you have a glorious future, a rich future before you. But I ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac |
