Metaphor Quotes - page 14
Cicero's style is a key to the success of De officiis, and not just the literary style, but the political and intellectual style. Regulus aside, the demands of duty generally stretch only as far as the well-educated, well-to-do man is likely to follow. Thus, he insists, in a famous metaphor that Machiavelli later stood on its head, that courage is necessary but the courage of a human being is not the ferocity of the lion, just as wisdom is necessary but the intelligence of the human being is not the cunning of the fox.
Alan Ryan
The separate excitation of the dynamo corresponds with the independently determined investment in the economic model, and the total excitation with income. Perhaps in this electrical age, the conventional metaphor of ‘priming the pump' might be dropped in favour of ‘exciting the dynamo'.
Arnold Tustin
The metaphor of the watch was very much used by the deists. And of course, watches run down, and break down, and it was believed by many of them that if an intelligence had begun the universe, begun the process, he'd took no further interest in it - didn't intervene in human affairs, didn't mind who won the war, didn't mind which country was the leading one, watched with relative-well, or didn't watch-with indifference, plague, famine, war and so forth. That's a very hard position to oppose, by the way. It's impossible, actually, to disprove - one can only the evidence for it isn't quite strong enough to be persuasive. To be a theist, to be a member of a monotheistic religion, that believes that truth has been revealed, that god has intervened in human affairs, that he has a plan for us - each of as individually and as a species, and that it shows - is a very much more difficult undertaking. I'm gonna show why I think it's more or less impossible.
Christopher Hitchens
It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.
Alberto Manguel
We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.
John Battelle
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.
Martin Gardner
[Indra's Net is a metaphor for] the profound cosmology and outlook that permeates Hinduism. Indra's Net symbolizes the universe as a web of connections and interdependences [...] I seek to revive it as the foundation for Vedic cosmology and show how it went on to become the central principle of Buddhism, and from there spread into mainstream Western discourse across several disciplines.
Rajiv Malhotra
In the Mahabharata, the ceremony for the oath of a new king includes the admonition: 'Be like a garland-maker, O king, and not like a charcoal burner.' The garland symbolizes social coherence; it is a metaphor for dharmic diversity in which flowers of many colors and forms are strung harmoniously for the most pleasing effect. In contrast, the charcoal burner is a metaphor for the brute-force reduction of diversity into homogeneity, where diverse living substances are transformed into uniformly lifeless ashes.
Rajiv Malhotra
Now, to use the famous metaphor by Alfred Korzybski in his Science and Sanity (1933), this verbal world ought to stand in relation to the extensional world as a map does to the territory it is supposed to represent. If a child grows to adulthood with a verbal world in his head which corresponds fairly closely to the extensional world that he finds around him in his widening experience, he is in relatively small danger of being shocked or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world has told him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life. If, however, he grows up with a false map in his head [...] he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting his efforts, and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the world as it is: he may, if the lack of adjustment is serious, end up in a mental hospital. (editor's link)
S. I. Hayakawa
