I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

14 min read

Author: Mardy Grothe

  • A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

  • Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

  • “Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” And then he added: A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks, or does is without consequences.

  • Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable. MAYA ANGELOU

  • Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.

  • Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. RAY BRADBURY

  • If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions
are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. RACHEL CARSON

  • A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers. NICOLAS CHAMFORT

  • A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was. JOSEPH HALL

  • No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. STANISLAW LEC

  • For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair. ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  • There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

  • George Orwell’s best-known lines: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

  • Plato: “As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”

  • Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. MARK TWAIN

  • On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. VIRGINIA WOOLF

  • Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots. STEVE ALLEN

  • According to comic genius Victor Borge, there are also important interpersonal benefits: Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

  • Wit is a treacherous dart. It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible to stab oneself in one’s own back.

  • MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken. LEWIS BLACK

  • Thespis, a Greek poet in the sixth century B.C., is considered the world’s first actor. At a time when all stage productions were choral affairs, he was the first person to deliver spoken lines. He lives on in the word thespian, an eponym for an actor.

  • Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody.

  • Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. E. B. WHITE

  • College: a fountain of knowledge where all go to drink. HENNY YOUNGMAN

  • Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation. JOHN CASSAVETES

  • He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened. WINSTON CHURCHILL,

  • He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. GEORGE ELIOT,

  • If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on George Bush’s head. JIM HIGHTOWER,

  • The air currents of the world never ventilated his mind. WALTER H. PAGE, on Woodrow Wilson

  • Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth. ANN RICHARDS, on George H. W. Bush

  • Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan—a Mount Rushmore of incompetence. DAVID STEINBERG

  • Reading him is like wading through glue. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, on Ben Jonson

  • Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking. KAHLIL GIBRAN

  • The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech. CLIFTON FADIMAN

  • Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life. BERN WILLIAMS

  • Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. SØREN

  • Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. SØREN KIERKEGAARD

  • Coincidences are spiritual puns. G. K. CHESTERTON

  • Doodling is the brooding of the mind. SAUL STEINBERG

  • Feedback is the breakfast of champions. KEN BLANCHARD & SPENCER JOHNSON

  • Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. ROBERT FROST

  • A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. FRANK CAPRA

  • Imagination is intelligence with an erection. VICTOR HUGO

  • Journalism is literature in a hurry. MATTHEW ARNOLD

  • Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. THOMAS ALVA EDISON

  • A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. STEFAN KANFER

  • Zeal is a volcano, on the peak of which the grass of indecisiveness does not grow. KAHLIL GIBRAN

  • Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

  • It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken. ARISTOTLE

  • Life is a tragedy when seen in close up, but a comedy in long shot. CHARLES CHAPLIN

  • Life is a sum of all your choices. ALBERT CAMUS

  • I’ve learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. ANDY ROONEY

  • Lives are like rivers; eventually they go where they must, not where we want them to. RICHARD RUSSO

  • A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

  • Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast. MARLENE DIETRICH

  • observation from Jeanne Bourgeois, the French singer and dancer better known as Mistinguette: “A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling every woman ought to know.”

  • When you get back together with an old boyfriend, it’s pathetic. It’s like having a garage sale and buying your own stuff back. LAURA KIGHTLINGER

  • Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces. ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  • No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever. FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

  • G. K. Chesterton, without formally mentioning beauty, said pretty much the same thing: “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”

  • The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed. SUZANNE NECKER

  • The game women play is men. ADAM SMITH

  • Going out with a jerky guy is kind of like having a piece of food caught in your teeth. All your friends notice it before you do. LIVIA SQUIRES

  • Dr. Iannis launches into an extended analogy. I was captivated when I first read the passage, and I hope you will enjoy it as well: Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body
. That is just being “in love,” which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we found that we were one tree and not two.

  • Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke. LYNDA BARRY

  • Love matches, as they are called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  • Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties. JULES RENARD

  • Love is the only disease that makes you feel better. SAM SHEPARD

  • English playwright William Congreve found an analogy between marriage and the theater: Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.

  • I always compare marriage to communism. They’re both institutions that don’t conform to human nature, so you’re going to end up with lying and hypocrisy. BILL MAHER

  • When a woman gets married, it’s like jumping into a hole in the ice in the middle of winter; you do it once and you remember it the rest of your days. MAXIM GORKY

  • People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed. MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

  • Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

  • metaphorical passage from the Talmud: Our passions are like travelers: at first they make a brief stay; then they are like guests, who visit often; and then they turn into tyrants, who hold us in their power.

  • Writing is like making love. Don’t worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process. ISABEL ALLENDE Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did. JAMES BALDWIN Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it. RICHARD P. FEYNMAN Art is the sex of the imagination. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN Hair is another name for sex. VIDAL SASSOON Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. SUSAN SONTAG

  • The Rubicon is a river that, in ancient times, divided Italy and Gaul. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the river in a military march against Pompey. He acted in defiance of the Roman Senate’s orders, saying “the die is cast” as he crossed the river. Ever since, “Crossing the Rubicon,” has been a metaphor for taking a step after which there is no turning back.

  • Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports. HUGH HEFNER

  • Female passion is to masculine as the epic is to an epigram. KARL KRAUS Since an epic contains many thousands of words, and an epigram generally fewer than a dozen, it is clear who has the most passion, according to this observation.

  • In 1728, at age twenty-two, Benjamin Franklin began tinkering with a possible epitaph for himself. He went through several possibilities—some serious, some clever—before composing this metaphorical masterpiece: The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding), Lies here, food for worms; But the work shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.

  • For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.

  • Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Eloquence is a painting of thought.”

  • Just because there’s snow on the roof, it doesn’t mean the boiler’s gone out. AMERICAN PROVERB

  • Perhaps the most famous metaphor about youth comes from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra tries to convince Mark Antony that her love for him is the real thing, and nothing like the youthful and foolish infatuation she had for Julius Caesar. In making her case, she refers to: My salad days, when I was green in judgment.

  • The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who won three Academy Awards and was nominated for six more, was often asked about how he approached the myriad of decisions he had to make as a director. While he usually said he favored intuition over intellect, he once offered a fascinating description of how both were at work in his decision-making process: I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.

  • I’ve always found it fascinating that the original author of the observation—in my view, the most memorable words ever offered on the subject—was not some celebrated writer or wordsmith, but a simple schoolboy who in a momentary muse happened to notice a connection between two of his favorite activities, watching television and chewing gum.

  • When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that’s been watered. MARLENE DIETRICH, on Orson Welles

  • The cinema is truth twenty-four times a second. JEAN-LUC GODARD

  • The camera is a little like the surgeon’s knife. JEAN RENOIR

  • A monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft which would never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

  • Anacharsis became a trusted advisor to Solon and was the first outsider to be made an Athenian citizen

  • Jonathan Swift: Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

  • Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California State Assembly, said in an interview in Look magazine: Money is the mother’s milk of politics.

  • Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion. LORD ACTON (John Dahlberg)

  • Lord Acton, a nineteenth-century British historian, is best known for the dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  • Man is by nature a political animal. ARISTOTLE

  • Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  • Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made. OTTO VON BISMARCK

  • “My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.” G. K. CHESTERTON

  • Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it. WINSTON CHURCHILL

  • Churchill, who once wrote that “Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician,”

  • You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. MARIO CUOMO

  • An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. GEORGE ELIOT

  • The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes. STANLEY KUBRICK

  • Nancy Mitford observed: “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”

  • Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. RONALD REAGAN,

  • A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top. JAMES RESTON

  • Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  • Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed frequently, and for the same reason. ROBIN WILLIAMS

  • In The Female Eunuch (1971), Germaine Greer put it this way: “Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.” However, the best line on the subject comes from John Kenneth Galbraith: “All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.”

  • Playing polo is like trying to play golf during an earthquake. SYLVESTER STALLONE, actor & polo player

  • Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hand can’t hit what the eye can’t see. MUHAMMAD ALI

Graph View