Quotes about Metaphor

The thorn is one of the most cursed and angry and crabbed weeds that the earth yields, and yet out of it springs the rose, one of the sweetest smelled flowers, and most delightful to the eye.

Evening may therefore be called 'the old age of the day,' and old age, 'the evening of life,' or, in the phrase of Empedocles, 'life's setting sun.

In other words, one metaphor (salt) speaks of the role of Jesus' people to Israel and the other (light) to the Gentile world.

The pen is mightier than the sword, if you shoot that pen out of a gun.

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.

Revelation is a "meeting" between God and the believer whereby God speaks and we hear. The "spoken word" is a metaphor containing two elements: personal encounter and the impartation of knowledge.

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman.

In the fable, the garden is a symbol for the mind.

Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful healer who communicated in signs, images, and gestures. Therefore, to understand Jesus and the Scriptures, we need to train ourselves and others not to exegete more words but to exegete images.

Spiritual teaching must always be by symbols.