"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still more of God's tender care. "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him." This metaphor beautifully expresses the care and the tenderness of God toward his children. The eagle is noted for her great attachment to her young. Her care is extraordinary. When the little eaglets have attained age and strength to ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... to the metaphor, I kept on shoving in chips, just as if I had a chance to win out and wasn't the biggest, softest-headed idiot the Lord ever made. Why, even Perry Potter almost grinned when I came riding up to the corral; and I caught the fellow ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... is opposed to sharp: and a thing is said to be sharp because it can pierce; so that a thing is called dull through being obtuse and unable to pierce. Now a bodily sense, by a kind of metaphor, is said to pierce the medium, in so far as it perceives its object from a distance or is able by penetration as it were to perceive the smallest details or the inmost parts of a thing. Hence in corporeal things the senses ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... not conceive with what untiring vigilant care Heaven will seek to disentangle the flower from the weed?—how (let me drop inadequate metaphor)—how Heaven will select for its warning chastisements that very error which the man has so blent with his virtues that he holds it a virtue itself?—how, gradually, slowly, pertinaciously, it will gather this beautiful nature all to itself—insist ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... denied this vehemently, with protestations and tears. He insisted, but, looking up at a tree almost denuded of leaves which grew close by, said, significantly, 'Take care that not a leaf remains on that tree by the morning.' The woman understood the metaphor, and in an hour or two, aided by other strapping Zulu females, attacked the unfortunate Basuto and killed him with clubs. But Cetywayo having thus, like the monkey in the fable, employed a cat's paw to do his dirty work, began to think the ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... mingled emotions her words caused him was a sense of surprise at her recollection of his metaphor. ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... says that the right of war and peace is in the nation. Where else should it reside but in those who are to pay the expense? In England this right is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... metaphor was no protection against her. She remembered all Cousin Jane's implications, all the bald ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... favourite parables of the preachers, and the metaphors and ornaments which they selected, were at all times of a military cast; and the taking the kingdom of heaven by storm, a strong and beautiful metaphor, when used generally as in Scripture, was detailed in their sermons in all the technical language of the attack and defence of a fortified place. The danger, in short, whatever might have been its actual degree, had disappeared as suddenly as a bubble upon the water, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... In this he resembled Browning, who never would write verse that was easy reading. Meredith's thought is usually clear, yet his brilliant but erratic mind was impelled to clothe this thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No man ever put more real thought into novels ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... intensive prefix pot (which is not unusual in the tongue, as pot-hokan, very evident, etc.). The historian Herrera, on some authority not known to me, further explains this term as one of contempt applied to the people there, meaning rude and barbarous;[6-1] as we should say, using the same metaphor, "stinkards." ...
— The Battle and the Ruins of Cintla • Daniel G. Brinton
... of Zakkai, called "the father of wisdom." Like the Greek philosophers who taught their pupils in the gardens of the "Academy" at Athens, the Rabbis may have lectured to their students in a "Vineyard" at Jamnia. Possibly the term "Vineyard" was only a metaphor applied to the meeting-place of the Wise at Jamnia, but, at all events, the result of these pleasant intellectual gatherings was the Rabbinical literature. Jochanan himself was a typical Rabbi. For a great part of his ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... better,—it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante's page glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, or compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a circuit of shining ripple, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... nature, an oratour by arte, and a scriuener by education, in all obedience & chastity, most bountifully bid you welcome to Wittenberg: welcome sayde I? O orificiall rethorike wipe thy euerlasting mouth, and affoord me a more Indian metaphor than that, forthe braue princely bloud of a Saxon. Oratorie vncaske the hard hutch of thy complements, and with the triumphantest troupe in thy treasurie doe trewage vnto him. What impotent speech with his eight partes may not specifie this vnestimable guift holding his peace, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... are talking in riddles," said Dic, pretending not to understand. "Drop your metaphor and tell ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... sense of closing or fastening. And note that the later Gothic being precisely what Scott knew best (in Melrose) and liked best, it is, here as elsewhere, quite as much himself[59] as Frank, that he is laughing at, when he laughs with Andrew, whose "opensteek hems" are only a ruder metaphor for his ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... use of picturesque metaphor is of course a striking feature of American conversation. Many of these expressions have taken firm root in England, such as "to have no use for" a man, or "to take no stock in" a theory. But fresh inventions crop up on every hand in America. For instance, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... at the rustic maid's simile; and, not to be outdone in metaphor, told her there were dogs that barked, and dogs that bit. "Our master is one of those that bite. I've done the priest's business. He is as like to get the sack ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... part in the adoration of the king. According to a custom common towards the Graeco-Roman period, the sculptor has made the feet of his gods like jackals' heads; it is a way of realizing the well-known metaphor which compares a rapid runner to the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Injustice, again, is found in self-injury or suicide; which the law penalises, not because the individual thereby treats himself unjustly, but because he does an injustice to the community. It is only by metaphor that a man may be called unjust to himself, an expression which means that the relation between one part of him and another part of him is analogous to the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... it as far as possible, as it was originally published. If the old binding has been torn off, and the volume hedged in by a crowd of modern literature, we must try to put these aside and consider the book as it was first issued; in other words, to drop metaphor altogether, in considering a building like Canterbury Cathedral, we must forget the busy little country town, with its crowded streets and noisy railway stations, though, from one point of view, the contrast that they present is agreeable and valuable, and try to conceive the church ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... old-fashioned, all-round country doctor Applauds what would have blushed at a few years ago Architectural measles in this country Avoid comparisons, similes, and even too much use of metaphor Book a window, through which I am to see life Cannot be truthfulness about life without knowledge Contemporary play instead of character we have "characters," Disposition to make the best of whatever comes to us Do not habitually postpone that ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... tale, it is easy to write a loose story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... cousin, a gentleman of so fair sort as you are, of so true carriage, so special good parts; of so dear and choice estimation; one whose lowest condition bears the stamp of a great spirit; nay more, a man so graced, gilded, or rather, to use a more fit metaphor, tinfoiled by nature; not that you have a leaden constitution, coz, although perhaps a little inclining to that temper, and so the more apt to melt with pity, when you fall into the fire of rage, but for your lustre only, which reflects as bright to the ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... 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 ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... that Bruno apprehended these points with distinctness, or that he expressed them precisely in the forms with which we are familiar. The hackneyed metaphor of a Pisgah view across the promised land applies to him with singular propriety. Moreover, as an acute critic has remarked, things old and new are so curiously blended in his writings that what at first sight appears modern, is often found upon reflection to be antique, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a smart answer, in a quirkish reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly diverting or cleverly retorting an objection: sometimes it is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, in a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plausible reconciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense: sometimes a scenical representation of persons or things, a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth for it: sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Japanese interests. International relations placed—and, we repeat it, inevitably placed—on this footing resemble a boxing match in which one of the contestants should have his hands tied. But the metaphor fails in an essential point, as metaphors are apt to do—the hand-tied man does not realise the disadvantage under which he labours. He thinks himself as ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... produced by interjections, which condense entire sentences into syllables. And in other cases, where custom allows us to express thoughts by single words, as in Beware, Heigho, Fudge, much force would be lost by expanding them into specific propositions. Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... original [Greek: anechaitise] is "shakes off," or "throws off," as a horse does his rider, when he rears and tosses up his neck. It will be observed that Demosthenes is very high-flown in his language here, passing from one metaphor to another. Leland translates these words, "overthrows him, and all his greatness is dashed at once to the ground." Francis: "hath already shaken off the yoke and dissolved their alliance." Wilson: "turneth all things upside down ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... like one or two vices, to be sure; but I can back a horse and fire a pistol 'without thinking or blinking' like Major Sturgeon; I have fed at times for two months together on sheer biscuit and water (without metaphor); I can get over seventy or eighty miles a day riding post, and swim five at a stretch, as at Venice, in 1818, or at least I could do, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... for thus is mind kept on the alert, like a sentinel fearing surprise. Of this an essay might be filled with illustrations. He does not try to use figures, but can not keep from using them. As stars flash into light, so he flashes into metaphor, metonymy, trope, personification, or simile. Because he sees everything, is he fertile in suggestion, and his comparisons are numerous as his thoughts. See how his figures multiply as you have seen foam-caps multiply on waves when the wind rises on ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... example of 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 the technical vocabularies of the railway, the telegraph, the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... glorying in its crisp solidity, and sparkling pinnacles, resenting attention paid to its submerged self, or supporting region, or to the saline liquid out of which it arose, and into which in due course it will some day return. Or, reversing the metaphor, we might liken our present state to that of the hulls of ships submerged in a dim ocean among strange monsters, propelled in a blind manner through space; proud perhaps of accumulating many barnacles as decoration; ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sit enthroned forever in one 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 ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Therefore, as humble and contrite, so poor and contrite are put together in the Word. 'But to this man will I look, even to him that is poor, and of a contrite spirit' (Isa 66:1,2). And here we still pursue our metaphor. A wounded man, a man with broken bones, concludes his condition to be but poor, very poor. Ask him how he does, and he answers, 'Truly, neighbours, in a very poor condition!' Also you have the spiritual poverty of such as have, or have ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... reverence.[50] It is one of the greatest productions of the human mind. Just that sort of composition which we form an awful and ravishing conception of, in those divine moments, when the soul (to use a bold metaphor) is in full blow, and soaring fancy reaches its utmost heights. Could it but be really personified—it would be like Saul of old, taller than any of the people, and were it to be guilty of a capital crime, it could not enjoy one of the greatest privileges ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... George Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?' And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence, would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was anxious that his engagement should be as short as possible, chiefly ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... thus that respect. able people desire to have their Greathearts address them, telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection; and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a manual of worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... well as she could. When Madame Martelli was quite out of breath with her excitement and the rapidity with which she had talked, Mrs. Murray said in the quiet, low tones in which she always speaks, and which sounded then like cold-water drops on a raging volcano, if there is any sense in that metaphor, which I don't believe there is, ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... strong, represents Death, but not under the old metaphor. She comes with renewed life— the child is the type of that— she comes as a deliverer. See, she is touching that poor worn-out creature, who is so tired that she can scarcely hold her head up again. Death, with a new aspect and a new, grand strength in her face is saying to this woman, 'Come ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... and Lord Lindsay is much to be blamed for leaving it entirely to the reader to distinguish between the determination of his research and the activity of his fancy—between the authority of his interpretation and the aptness of his metaphor. He who would assert the true meaning of a symbolical art, in an age of strict inquiry and tardy imagination, ought rather to surrender something of the fullness which his own faith perceives, than expose the fabric of his vision, too finely woven, to the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 "to seek for the roots," that is to say, to allow each Egyptian ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Boswell used a different metaphor. 'I think it is right that as fast as infidel wasps or venomous insects, whether creeping or flying, are hatched, they should be crushed.' Letters of Boswell, p. 232. If the infidels were wasps to the orthodox, the orthodox were hornets to the infidels. Gibbon wrote (Misc. Works, i. 273):—'The ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... all the 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 one phase of Hasheesh Land, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Henry Grattan. The American war tested the rival champions of Liberty. Flood favored sending Irish troops, "armed negotiators" he called them, to deal with the revolted colonists. Grattan nobly reviled him for standing—"with a metaphor in his mouth and a bribe in his pocket, a champion against the rights of America, the only hope of Ireland and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind." Flood collapsed under his ignoble honors. He was not restored by returning to patriotic opposition. Grattan's leadership proved permanent ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... enforcement of the claims of power—an interpreter who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness of all "Will to Power" before your eyes, that almost every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually seem unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor—as being too human; and who should, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary" and "calculable" course, NOT, however, because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely LACKING, and every ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... plenty, the good professor's remarks would have had some significance; but as the burdens of existence rest equally on the shoulders of men and women, and we must ever struggle together on a common plane for bread, his metaphor has no foundation. Miss Anthony attended these teachers' conventions from year to year, at Oswego, Utica, Poughkeepsie, Lockport, Syracuse, making the same demands for equal place and pay, until she had the satisfaction to see every right conceded. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that we trust in Him as our Saviour and the Lord our Righteousness; He must also dwell in our hearts by faith as our spiritual life. The union is indeed mystical and indescribable, but none the less real or less joy-inspiring for all that. We want no metaphor and no mere abstraction in our souls; we want Christ Himself. We want to be able to say in sublime contradiction, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." And this, too, is the way of sanctification, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... 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
... first enriched their style—'twas I first taught them to crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives, each epithet rising above the other, like the bidders in their own auction rooms! From me they learned to inlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor: by me too their inventive faculties were called forth:—yes, sir, by me they were instructed to clothe ideal walls with gratuitous fruits—to insinuate obsequious rivulets into visionary groves—to teach courteous shrubs to nod their ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... justified that. The stirring excitement of the three months' contest between the great rivals led them to pronounce upon the transaction as a whole, and to leave unnoticed what seemed for the moment to be the minor issues—the moves, if we may borrow a metaphor from the chess-table, which opened the game; and it may be observed that, though, on the 17th of December, Pitt resisted Mr. Baker's resolution with his utmost energy, in the numerous debates which ensued he carefully avoided all allusion to Lord Temple's conduct, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... brains. These literal folk are the sort who imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says howsoever great a multitude flocked to worship therein, there was always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is! Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says, 'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Glenville to me, "broken her knees over the first metaphor. She will be plunging wildly in the ditch directly, and never fairly get out of it for about an hour and a half. Let us escape while we can." We rose and left Mrs. Delamere explaining to Thornton how darling Florence and ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... the Times, Mr. Brady and four boys dashed to the scene in a high-powered automobile, organised a bucket brigade and saved"—Mr. Fernald consulted his authority again—"saved the dwelling house from the devouring element. The metaphor is that of the paper. Possibly the Times is misinformed with regard to the heroic young firemen, although I hope not. I should be very pleased to discover that they were really Brimfieldians. If ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... I employ this 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 these ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... provided, and how the want of it has restricted the sphere of alienation. It is a great mistake to assume that it is a mere matter of common sense that the buyer steps into the shoes of the seller, according to our significant metaphor. Suppose that sales and other civil transfers had kept the form of warlike capture which it seems that they had in the infancy of Roman law, /1/ and which was at least [355] partially retained in one instance, the acquisition ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... sparkling wit, and a furious blast—a weighty argument, and a gentle stream—without being at all aware that we are speaking in the language of poetry, and transferring qualities from one extremity of the sphere of being to another. In these cases, accordingly, the metaphor, by ceasing to be felt, in reality ceases to exist, and the analogy being no longer intimated, of course can produce no effect. But whenever it is intimated, it does produce an effect; and that ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport?"), with respect to variations not having been specially ordained. Your metaphor of the river (203/4. See Wallace, op. cit., pages 477-8. He imagines an observer examining a great river-system, and finding everywhere adaptations which reveal the design of the Creator. "He would see special ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... and Columbus," says Froude, "created, not in any metaphor, but in plain language, a new heaven and a new earth." The new theory of Copernicus was, indeed, one of the choicest flowers of the Renaissance, and though timidly enunciated, it revolutionised the world's geography. Further, the discovery of the polarity of the magnet, and the invention ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... stay with you," said Henrietta, dropping the metaphor, for metaphors, even the mildest, were beyond ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... 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 ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... To drop the metaphor, our historians will find themselves confronted by a startling change. The great Victorians write no longer, but are succeeded by eccentrics. There is Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted of them all, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... stood the sternest human gaze, gave to the expression of her countenance such dignity and variety that we all agreed that it really was super-animal. The Scandinavian Scald, with such a mermaid before him, would find in her eye a metaphor so emphatic that he would have no reason to borrow the favourite oriental image of the gazelles ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... from his seat in the clouds. There can be but little doubt that the very notion of Thor's hammer itself was derived from the shape of the supposed thunderbolt, which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once to be an axe or mallet, not an arrowhead. The 'fiery axe' of Thunor is a common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Thus, Thor's hammer is itself merely the picture which our northern ancestors formed to themselves, by compounding the idea of thunder and lightning with the idea of the polished stone hatchets they dug up ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the statistics of criminal assaults committed by priests condemned to celibacy. It is equally superfluous to add that at all events, in again turning the priest into a schoolmaster, it would be necessary to recommend to him never to recall the invectives of Jesus against the rich, the metaphor of the camel passing through the eye of a needle, or the still more violent invectives of the Fathers of the Church against private property; for long before Proudhon, Saint Jerome had said that "wealth is always the product of theft; if it was not committed by the present holder, it was ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... broken slumber quivering ere it dies.] Venturi suggests that this bold and unusual metaphor may have been ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... dear Laura, you are like certain English women in the hunting field. You are inclined to rush your fences," said the Marchesa with a deprecatory gesture. "And just look at the people gathered here in this room. Wouldn't they—to continue the horsey metaphor—be rather an awkward team ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... 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
... 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 or poetical genius whilst ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... delivered by the protagonist, or supreme leader of the conversation? For it must be remembered that, generally speaking, the effect of putting no question is to transfer into the other party's hands the entire originating movement of the dialogue; and thus, in a musical metaphor, the great man is the sole modulator and determiner of the key in which the conversation proceeds. It is true, that sometimes, by travelling a little beyond the question in your answer, you may enlarge the basis, so as to bring up some new train of thought which you wish to introduce, and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... I omit two stanzas which continue the metaphor of the sea or lake of air. The moon is its lotus, the sun its wild-duck, the clouds are its water-weeds, Mars is its shark and so on. Gorresio remarks: "This comparison of a great lake to the sky and of celestial to aquatic objects is one of those ideas ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... formidable a step in the first year of her marriage. She was therefore compelled to drag the chain by which, with her own will, she had bound herself for life to one she already despised and detested. And bound she was, in the strictest sense of the metaphor; for, though the Duke had not the smallest pleasure in the society of his wife, he yet attached great ideas of propriety to their being always seen together, side by side. Like his sister, Lady Matilda, he had a high ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... unsatisfactory ground of metaphor, we may find out, on examination, that De Foe had discovered in 'Robinson Crusoe' precisely the field in which his talents could be most effectually applied; and that a very slight alteration in the subject-matter might change the merit of his ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... chivalry; and the importance of this parental instruction cannot be better illustrated than in the ever-recurring simile, 'Make thy mother's milk resplendent.' One need not reason on the intensity of sentiment thus implanted in the infant Rajput, of whom we may say without metaphor the shield is his cradle and daggers his playthings, and with whom the first commandment is 'Avenge thy father's feud.' [483] A Rajput yet loves to talk of the days of chivalry, when three things alone occupied him, his horse, his lance and his mistress; for she is but third in his estimation ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... supper, and she by the boldest manoeuvres had placed Captain Bertram next to herself by the coffee-tray, and had planted Matty at his other side, so that he was in a measure hemmed in, and if he did not talk to Matty had no one to fall back on but herself, who, of course, would quickly, using the metaphor of battledore and shuttlecock, toss him back to her daughter—having arranged all this, what should Bell do but put his foot ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... 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 B.C. to Antioch to meet the Queen of Egypt, but a political ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... little to show for what Raffles would call "our second innings." This even I could not deny. We had scored a few "long singles," but our "best shots" had gone "straight to hand," and we were "playing a deuced slow game." Therefore we needed a new partner—and the metaphor failed Raffles. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... Assonance frequently takes the place of rhyme, and a word often rhymes with itself. There is a lack of poetic adornment in the style quite as conspicuous as the lack of reflection and moralizing in the matter. Metaphor and simile are rare and when found are for the most part standing phrases common to all the ballads; there is never poetry for poetry's sake. Iteration is the chief mark of ballad style; and the favorite form of this effective figure is what one ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... enable us to see all sides of it. He possessed an enormous vocabulary, and had the fullest power over it; "never was a man under whose hands language was more plastic and ductile." He is very fond of metaphor, and is described by an able critic as "the greatest master of metaphor that the world has ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... with allegories," his companion objected petulantly. "The eternal blackness exists surely enough, even if my metaphor is faulty. I am disposed to be philosophical. Let me ramble on. Here am I, an idler in my boyhood, a harmless pleasure-seeker in my youth till I ran up against tragedy, and since then a drifter, a drifter with a slowly growing vice, lolling through life ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... justice to your skill and ability as a navigator, and to your good intentions towards the safety of the cargo and of the ship's company. I cannot say now that we are on different tacks. There would be no propriety in the metaphor. I can sail no longer. My vessel cannot be said to be even in port. She is wholly condemned and broken up. To have an idea of that vessel, you must call to mind what you have often seen on the Kentish road. Those planks of tough and hardy oak, that used for years ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Theophorus, the 'God-bearer,' which Ignatius himself adopted. But he had in his company several Ephesian delegates when he wrote; and the newly-discovered inscriptions inform us that the practice which supplies the metaphor had received a fresh impulse at Ephesus shortly before this letter was written. The most important inscriptions in Mr Wood's collection relate to a gift of numerous valuable statues, images, and other treasures to the temple of Artemis, by one C. Vibius Salutaris, with ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... profession, it will scarcely admit of doubt that the Order in Council was intended to be felt by them as a cruel affront. It was popularly believed that Petre had avowed this intention in a coarse metaphor borrowed from the rhetoric of the East. He would, he said, make them eat dirt, the vilest and most loathsome of all dirt. But, tyrannical and malignant as the mandate was, would the Anglican priesthood refuse to obey? ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... topsails alternately filling out and flapping again to the masts with the barely perceptible swing of the ship over the low, long, sleepy heave of the swell, and the courses drooping heavily and uselessly from the yards. The sky was "as clear as a bell," to use a favourite metaphor of Ritson's, not a trace of cloud being visible in any part of the vast sapphire vault which stretched overhead, spangled here and there with a few stars of the first magnitude, and with the moon, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... frequent in Italy, it is said the term bankrupt is derived from the Italian banco rotto, broken bench. Cowel (in his 4th Institute 227) rather chooses to deduce the word from the French banque, table, and route, vestigium, trace, by metaphor from the sign left in the ground, of a table once fastened to it and now gone. On this principle he traces the origin of bankrupts from the ancient Roman mensarii or argentarii, who had their tabernae or mensae in certain public places; and who, when they fled, or made off with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... 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 ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble a star—that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... occurrence throughout the Bible and naturally suggests the idea of the guiding, guarding, and feeding both of the individual sheep and of the whole flock and it is not difficult to see the spiritual correspondence of these things in a general sort of way. But we find that the Bible combines the metaphor of the Shepherd with another metaphor that of "the Stone," and at first sight the two seem ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... vote had helped to elect, and this was his revenge—so successful that, for generations, when the bell called the States or the Royal Court together, it said in the ears of the Jersey people—thus insistent is apt metaphor: ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... place in the generation that reached early manhood in the year 1500. [Sidenote: 1483-1546] In the span of a single life—for convenience let us take that of Luther for our measure—men discovered, not in metaphor but in sober fact, a new heaven and a new earth. In those days masses of men began to read many books, multiplied by the new art of printing. In those days immortal artists shot the world through with a matchless radiance of color and of meaning. In those days Vasco ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... put up with me when you knew nobody here," she said bitterly, "and as soon as you made friends with other people you threw me aside, like an old glove"—she repeated the stale metaphor with satisfaction—"like an old glove. All right, I don't care, but I'm not going to be made a ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... his head, he said, 'the 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 buried in it, shall we say to the bones ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... the suggestion. "The fit successor is not secured in this way. All experience proves it. The spark of genius is dropped where God will. It may find hereditary (hence accumulated) faculties ready to be ignited. It may fire the barren rock." And, changing the metaphor, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... couldn't bear to see her white flower—that's I, you know,"—Mary blushed even deeper in repeating the metaphor—"used for unworthy ends. She meant, of course, I see that,—she meant that what she said at lunch was for you and not for me. I'm sure that Imogen means ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... our author too closely to the terms of his own metaphor. The work from which I have just quoted is a booklet[27] in which he devoted himself to the task of refuting in detail the arguments urged by myself in the course of my American speeches. We will, therefore, turn to his criticism of what, in one of my speeches, I said about the state ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... exactly what Mr. Russell was going to say. He had a vague culinary metaphor in his mind. I hate the Germans because they are underdone, they are red meat. Their vices and their virtues and their music, and their greed and their fairyism and their militarism, all seem to ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... merely means that we know the germ will develop in a certain way. To say that a force is manifesting itself in the germ and assuming the shape which it chooses to take or must take is also merely a phrase and metaphor, but it seems to me ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... intervention. She felt its insignificance. She would not have complained if Quisante had followed Morewood's example and taken no notice of it. He stopped, turned to her with exaggerated deference, and greeted her obvious little carrying out of the metaphor as though it were a heaven-sent light. Somehow in doing this he seemed to fall all in an instant from lofty heights to depths almost beyond eyesight. While he complimented her elaborately, Morewood turned away in open impatience. Another topic was started, the conversation was killed; or, to put ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... been taken out of a sack for the horses, and a few grains lying scattered on the ground, I tried the beautiful metaphor of St. Paul as an example of a future state. Making a small hole with my finger in the ground, I placed a grain within it: "That," I said, "represents you when you die." Covering it with earth, I continued, "That grain will ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... found in Isa. 51:3: "For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall he found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody." Zion is a metaphor signifying the church of God. It is, therefore, the church which the Lord will comfort and whose wilderness will be made an Eden. But what is the church of God? This is a very important question; one which ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... profess to 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
... metaphors drawn from the universe of Time and Space—we can speak of 'another world' and of a 'future life'—but as soon as we attempt to conceive such existence sub specie aeternitatis our imagination fails: to use the metaphor of Socrates, we are dazzled by the insupportable radiance of the eternal and infinite, and seek to rest our eyes by turning them toward shadows, reflexions, images: we accept the beautiful image—the enigma (as St. Paul calls it) or allegory—of a heaven in some ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... about on the high seas, he is. And you, Joanna," I said, "you have committed a sin and are a fallen woman. But here stands Jacob Engstrand," I said, "on two strong legs"—of course that was only speaking in a kind of metaphor, ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... as well as sees the hand; by an easy license of metaphor, what was originally used to express the operation of our senses, is extended to them all. We do not precisely say, that Imagination, forms images of past sounds, or tastes, or smells; but we say that she forms ideas of them; and ideas, we are told, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... soul 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 again from its perilous ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... under Maximilian II, Ferdinand's successor, 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 ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... the meanest and most abject sophisms, provided those sophisms come before them disguised with the externals of demonstration. They do not seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric,—that a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... perhaps the very largest natural endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words were like sharp arrows that ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... on the subject of memory, standing comparisons and metaphors, intended to illustrate its uses and magnify its importance, but not declaring with any degree of precision what it is. It is called, for instance, the "storehouse of our ideas." The metaphor conveys undoubtedly a certain amount of truth in regard to the subject. At the same time, there are some important particulars, in which the comparison, for it is nothing more, conveys a wrong impression. Experience teaches us, for instance, that recollections, unlike other articles of store, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart |
