"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... again; that is the germ of the holiday. It may be urged that the club man who leaves his hat often goes away with another hat; and perhaps it may be the same with the factory hand who has left his head. A hand that has lost its head may affect the fastidious as a mixed metaphor; but, God pardon us all, what an unmixed truth! We could almost prove the whole ease from the habit of calling human beings merely "hands" while they are working; as if the hand were horribly cut off, like the hand that has offended; as if, while the sinner entered heaven maimed, his unhappy ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... Grant, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Epstein, and Mrs. Bell, at any rate, are all cut by Tooting, for they have seen the sun rise and warmed themselves in its rays; it is particularly to be regretted, therefore, that Mr. Lewis should have lent his great powers to the canalizing (for the old metaphor was the better) of the new spirit in a little backwater called English vorticism, which already gives signs of becoming as insipid as any other puddle of provincialism. Can no one persuade him to be warned by the fate of Mr. Eric Gill, who, some ten years ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of their matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and tremble, because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for breakfast. However, that morning he did not eat the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to carry on the metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and—ah! ejected ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... is due to Mr. W. M. Salter (who employed it in a similar manner in the 'Index' for August 24, 1882), and the dream-metaphor on p. 174 is a reminiscence from some novel of George Sand's—I forget which—read by me ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... talk of a 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 effect ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time, they have been 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vary the metaphor a little and call him an uncharted sea," Val smiled as he threw one leg over the other and settled himself among his cushions. He was dead tired, having been up since six in the morning and on his ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... and sky and hills, and turning the plain little settlement, in the harbour of which we are anchored, into the Never, Never Land. The scene is so bewitching that I find my soul purged by it of the bad taste of the attack. I'll leave you to digest the mixed metaphor undisturbed while I go below and help with the patients who have begun ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... made a close study of the setting hen, but I am still unsettled as to what is best to do with her. She is a freak of nature, a disagreeable anomaly, a fussy phenomenon. Logic, rhetoric and metaphor are all alike to the setting hen. You might as well go down into the bosom of Vesuvius and ask it to postpone the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... 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 Bob on ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... the deacon, hesitatingly. He did not understand metaphor. "You are not thinking of ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... to mother I kept hinting that the glories of Bellaire were actually taking root in my soul," said Cleo, as the girl dressed next morning, almost unconscious of the task they were performing. "Now she will understand the metaphor." ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... the force of that. He was a little impressed by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he asked, abruptly. "I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn't such fun ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... 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, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... 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 have been roasted in a hurry, and to contain, like red meat, the natural juices to an extent that ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... a symbol or 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 to denote gospel blessings, (as ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... verified by any one who can and will go 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 saints ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Jew, my parents were transferred—mysteriously and by night—to an obscure individual in an obscure quarter of the metropolis, when, in secrecy and silence, I was cast, to use an appropriate metaphor, upon the world. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... cloud-bank, which was Ireland, lay nebulously against our port bow—I felt a change take place. It was almost physical, organic. The dawn grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the coming sun reached out across the grey wastes of the St. George's Channel. I am loth to use the trite metaphor of "a spiritual dawn." By a strange twist of things, my barest hint of a soul within me, that is to say, the faintest glimmer of the ever-increasing purpose of my being—the moment it showed through, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... that it alludes to the last or lowest stage of the supposed ladder of love; others that it refers to the first or elementary line traced by the student, when beginning to learn the art of painting. It is however more generally thought to be a metaphor taken from the chariot-races in the Circus, where, in going round the turning-place, he who was nearest was said "currere in prima linea;" the next, "in secunda;" and so on to the last, who took the widest range, and was said to ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... be, of course, wedded for better or for worse, according to the reasonable practice of Scotland, to its dogmata, or opinions, and bound, as it were, by the tie matrimonial, or, to speak without metaphor, ex jure sanguinis, to maintain them in preference ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was rich in metaphor and still richer in quotation. From the Greeks, from the Romans, from the English, from America, from Australia, from all parts of the globe did the young writer cull incident and quotation. She used a brief and telling argument, and she brought it to a successful and logical conclusion. ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... that every metaphor shall be absolutely new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... formed them. If I protest against the 'Transfiguration,' and refuse to worship at that altar before which so many generations have knelt, there are hundreds of others which I salute thankfully. It is not so much in the set harangues (to take another metaphor), as in the daily tones and talk that his voice is so delicious. Sweet poetry, and music, and tender hymns drop from him: he lifts his pencil, and something gracious falls from it on the paper. How noble his mind must have been! it seems but to receive, and his eye seems only to rest on, what is ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in metaphor," explained Bess. "But you wait! She will wring tears from your eyes before she gets through with you. As the little girls say, you can see her ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... whether young Henry is a pragmatist or not, he is a most understanding human being. The only way to read these "Letters" is to dip into them here and there, as the only way to make a good salad is to pour the vinegar on drop by drop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated by the acid of wit, the salt of wisdom, and the pepper of humour. Frankly, since I discovered William James as a human being I have begun to read him for the same reason that ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... capacity to suffer meanly and inflict mean suffering upon others. In the ruined castle of her youth, and the falling in of banqueting hall and bower, the dungeon and torture-chamber appeared to have been left, or, to use her own metaphor, she had querulously complained to the parson that, "Accordin' to some folks, she mout hev bin the barren ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the mellifluous Teutonic verse will sound when adapted to another tongue. And, first of all—for we yearn to know it—tell us how thy inspiration came? A plain answer, of course, we cannot expect—that were impossible from a German; but such explanation as we can draw from metaphor and oracular response, seems to be conveyed in that favourite and elaborate preface to the poems, which accordingly we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... Mr. Vane felt overpowered by this torch in a closet. To vary the metaphor, it seemed to him, as she swept up and down, as if the green-room was a shell, and this glorious creature must burst it and be free. Meantime, the others saw a pretty actress studying her business; and Cibber saw a dramatic school-girl learning ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... his hearers that he was there that evening for no terrifying, no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world speaking to his fellow-men. He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... one that must everywhere be welcome, both for its manner and for its matter. The application of the "Truths" is generally enforced by a felicitous apologue or figure; in some cases the lesson is conveyed in a beautiful metaphor standing alone. The extracts are brief, and the point, never wanting, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... in the past age when persons occasionally used metaphor as an aid to the expression of their ideas. Being called upon to explain herself, she did it in metaphor, to her own ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... legislation, and the literature of our people. When Daniel Webster, himself a son of a seafaring State, sought to awaken his countrymen to the peril into which the nation was drifting through sectional dissensions and avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... perchance, regards his invisible 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 one has been given, and in whose soul heaven and earth, the invisible and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the Venice of his prejudices—the merciless Venice of Daru, and of the historians who follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion removed; and—to take leave of our theatrical metaphor—I promise to fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often get from travelers' ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Assyria, the prophet might be tempted to use a foreign word to make his point more emphatic. To take HSKYRH as "hired," as has hitherto been done, and to translate "with a hired razor," is not only to suppose a very wooden metaphor, but is grammatically difficult, since HSKYRH would be a feminine adjective ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... 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 steamship, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... following, copied from a REVIEW, are the works of Genius perpetually criticized in our public Prints: "Passion has not sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... invites the eye to gaze longer and longer into its infinite depths.[46-2] Its color brings thoughts of serenity, peace, sunshine, and warmth. Even the rudest hunting tribes felt these sentiments, and as a metaphor in their speeches, and as a paint expressive of friendly design, blue was in wide ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... metaphor stink, I will stop my nose; or against any man's metaphor. Pr'ythee, get ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... 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 considered ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Roots. That was the metaphor that had eluded Nan. To be rooted and grounded in life, like a tree. Someone had written something ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... but your metaphor is more poetical than just; your discipline, however, I have no doubt, is better fitted to enable me to bear the light than to contemplate it through the smoked or ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Kur-Brandenburg!' [Stenzel, iv. 156.] Nevertheless, in about a week she again yields to intense conjuring, and the ever-tightening pressure of events;—King George, except it be for counselling, is become stock-still, with Maillebois's sword at his throat; and is, without metaphor, sinking towards absolute neutrality: 'Cannot help you, Madam, any farther; must not try it, or I perish, my Hanover and I!'—So that Maria Theresa again mends her offers: 'Give him all Lower Silesia, and he to join with me!' and Robinson post-haste despatches a courier to Breslau ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... already there were certain signs of alteration in its character. Pulteney and Walpole's other adversaries had already glimmerings of the newspaper proper, that is to say, of the continual dropping fire rather than the single heavy broadside; to adopt a better metaphor still, of a regimental and professional soldiery rather than of single volunteer champions. The Letters of Junius, which for some time past have been gradually dropping from their former somewhat undue pride of place (gained and kept as much by the factitious ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... 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
... about possible houses at Thebes to hire a boat and depart. Yesterday I saw a camel go through the eye of a needle—i.e., the low arched door of an enclosure; he must kneel and bow his head to creep through—and thus the rich man must humble himself. See how a false translation spoils a good metaphor, and turns a familiar simile into a ferociously communist sentiment. I expect Henry and Janet here in four or five days when her ancle allows her to travel. If I get a house at Thebes, I will only hire a boat ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... for example, might perhaps tell us, though a prosaic person cannot, what is the secret of the impression made by such a poem as the 'Wreck of the Royal George.' Given an ordinary newspaper paragraph about wreck or battle, turn it into the simplest possible language, do not introduce a single metaphor or figure of speech, indulge in none but the most obvious of all reflections—as, for example, that when a man is once drowned he won't win any more battles—and produce as the result a copy of verses which nobody can ever read without instantly knowing them by heart. How Cowper managed ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... and before sunrise in the east in the autumn, and known to the Arabs as the "False Dawn," does not appear to be mentioned in Scripture. Some commentators wrongly consider that the expression, "the eyelids of the morning," occurring twice in the Book of Job, is intended to describe it, but the metaphor does not ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... which they were not literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated from moment to moment by ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... please," resumed the impetuous Overtop. "A donkey, then. Perhaps the metaphor will be better. What I mean—what you two are so dull as not to see—is to put this unreliable Maltboy on a moderate allowance of flirtation; to keep him, for example, within the limits of this block. D'ye see? D'ye catch ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some colour of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... 1806, but he lived long enough to hear the splendid eloquence of Grattan, rich in imagination, metaphor, and epigram; and to open the doors of the official hierarchy to George Canning. Trained by Pitt, and in many gifts and graces his superior, Canning first displayed his full greatness after the death ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... anonymously or otherwise, to indulge my humour of serving him." "You are an angel!" said Horatio, with his eyes fixed on the ground—(the spirit of the angel of benevolence,—quoth Reason, whispering in his ear, would have been 19 a better metaphor,—certainly inhabits the aged bosom of your father's sister). Horatio's upraised eye rested on the wrinkled front of his antique relative, just as the corrective thought gleamed in visionary brightness o'er his brain; the poetic inspiration of the moment fled like the passing meteor, but the feeling ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... not new in theme or manner, but the praise which it received was well merited by its ease and grace. Moreover Denham expressed his commonplaces with great dignity and skill. He followed the taste of the time in his frequent use of antithesis and metaphor, but these devices seem to arise out of the matter, and are not of the nature of mere external ornament. At Oxford he wrote many squibs against the roundheads. One of the few serious pieces belonging to this period is the short poem "On the Earl of Strafford's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... it as a sort of symbol," suggested Mr. Beresford; "a kind of flowery metaphor signifying that all Ireland, in his person, is at her disposal, only waiting to be ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... my first memories," he 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
... forced to yield at last to the pressure of public 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 his ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... butter ([Greek: etyrheue]): i.e. concocting the plot. (For the metaphor cf. Aristophanes, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... 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, but not everybody's darling for all that. There is ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... volume of my "Egypt" I call the languages sentence-languages and word-languages; that is without metaphor, and cannot be misunderstood. The distinction itself is right. For organic is (as Kant has already defined it) an unity in parts. A granite mountain is not more thoroughly granite than a square inch of granite, but a man without hands or ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... ideal, and the allegorical spirit of the time, first suggested the expedient of placing round the figure of the glorified Virgin certain accessory symbols, which should assist the artist to express, and the observer to comprehend, what seemed beyond the power of art to portray;—a language of metaphor then understood, and which we also must understand if we would seize the complete theological idea intended to ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... metaphor; it is contrary to the Statute to fly out so early: but who can tell, whether it may not be demonstrated by some critick or other, that a deviation from rule is peculiarly happy in ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He exists and is evil; you are free to say (like poor old Renan) that He would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one's ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... is put forth once for all in His Incarnation and Death. 'He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham,' says the Epistle to the Hebrews, looking at our Lord's work under this same metaphor, and explaining that His laying hold of men was His being 'made in all points like unto His brethren.' Just as he took hold of the fevered woman and lifted her from her bed; or, as He thrust His fingers into the deaf ears of that poor man stopped by some impediment, so, in analogous fashion, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... This mixed metaphor affected Mrs. Willoughby with a curious interest. "Oh, is he!" she exclaimed, and, glancing down, she looked unexpectedly into Severance's ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... 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 ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... there seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason, as Larry said, in the fact that they should be continually getting out of the frying-pan into the fire. Yet so it was, and, now that they had left the low country and plunged into the magnificent recesses of the great Andes, the metaphor was still applicable, though not, perhaps, equally appropriate, for, whereas the valleys they had quitted were sweltering in tropical heat, the mountains they had now ascended ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... the inhabitants of the kitchen came out of the kitchen, and stood upon the stairs. These, and similar expressions, show how much the Irish are disposed to metaphor ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... descent and embodiment, or Incarnation of Vishnu," in a metaphysical sense, the Spirit (generically), that renews, rejuvenates, transforms, and regenerates, is by no means an empty metaphor. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... mixed metaphor," Mr. Giddings admitted in confidence; "but," he continued, "if metaphors, like drinks, happen to be more potent mixed, the Herald proposes ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into the night air, looking the prettiest little genre picture in the ruddy firelight that ever was painted on such a background of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... by this parental backing, Mr. Britt did not employ a happy metaphor. "It has been my rule, in the case of bitter medicine, to take it quick and have the agony over with." He put all the appeal he could muster into his gaze at Vona. "That's why I have sprung the thing this evening, on ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... problem; 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
... tried to get a metaphor. They had turned the cliff and were riding along the road about ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... singing of the light- hearted shepherd-boy. But at night the shadows come again; the shouts and vauntings of my adversary are heard; I can see his crimson eyeballs, full of malignant rage, glaring at me. To drop metaphor, my dear girl, my nights are simply hellish. But I shall conquer yet; my time will come. Only, to me, a sufferer turning on his bed and wishing for the dawn, how long the time delays its coming! If I could only feel the fresh ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... 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 ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... right. 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... image was not new. It is found in Stoic writers. It underlies the surname 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 ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— Thou, to whom fools propound, When the wine makes its round, "Since life fleets, all is change; the ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... that he had been checkmated in the first move of the game in which cattle and sheep were the pawns and cowboys and herders the castles, knights, and, stretching the metaphor a bit, bishops, tacitly admitted defeat and employed a diagonal to draw the cattle-men's forces elsewhere. He determined to locate on the abandoned water-hole ranch, homestead it, and, by so doing, cut off the supply of water necessary to the cattle on the west side of the Concho River. ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... at, because familiar to us—namely, that in the gestation of the mammals, the animalcule-like ovum of a few days is the parent, in a sense, of the chick-like form of a few weeks, and that in all the subsequent stages—fish, reptile, &c.—the one may, with scarcely a metaphor, be said to be the progenitor of the other. I suggest, then, as an hypothesis already countenanced by much that is ascertained, and likely to be further sanctioned by much that remains to be known, that the first step was AN ADVANCE UNDER FAVOUR OF PECULIAR CONDITIONS, FROM THE SIMPLEST ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... older than you," continued Miss Tousy, the old and the wise, "and never, never again allow anything to separate you. Love is the sweetest blossom of life, whose gentle wings will always cover you with the aromatic harmony of an everlasting sunlight." Rita thought the metaphor beautiful, and Dic was too interested to be critical. Then Rita and Miss Tousy, without any reason at all, began to weep, and Dic felt as uncomfortable as the tears of ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... with himself for bright sayings, which he always accompanied with a cock of the eye. The musician not showing any visible appreciation of the manager's metaphor, Perkins immediately proceeded to uncock ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... let the rye 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... 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 ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a fulfilment of the cry of the ancient sufferer, who had lamented that his enemies made so sure of his death that they divided his garments and cast lots for his vesture. But he was 'wiser than he knew,' and, while his words were to his own apprehension but a vivid metaphor expressing his desperate condition, 'the Spirit which was in' him 'did signify' by them 'the sufferings of Christ.' Theories of prophecy or sacrifice which deny the correctness of John's interpretation have the New Testament against them, and assume to know ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Song. But the contrast between Uhland's hardy, active, public-spirited youth and Heine's sleepy, amorous individualist is no more striking than the difference between Uhland's rhetorical and Heine's tropical method. Heine's poem is an elaboration of the single metaphor with which it begins: "Kingly is the herd-boy's calling." The poem Pine and Palm, in which Heine expresses his hopeless separation from the maiden of whom he dreams—incidentally attributing to Amalie a feeling of sadness and solitude to which she was a stranger—is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... can after all but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of the mind, says: "Imagine an iceberg 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; only recognizing our destination by bumping ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... subject and hope for results. The scheme did not work. The obtuse editor did not know he was being nibbled at; but at last, chance accomplished what art had failed in. In illustration of something under discussion which required the help of metaphor, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... naturalistic, almost childish, and specially drawn from the phenomena that most interested their simple existence, to which all advanced civilization, whether material or intellectual, was still foreign. But among the Egyptians the same metaphor appear with a far more general and elevated significance. The serpent Assap is no longer the storm-cloud but the personification of darkness, which the sun, under the form of Ra or Horus, encounters during his nocturnal passage through the lower hemisphere, and has to triumph ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... put down any dirty stain before your Honour," sobbed Mrs. Twomey, recurring to her earlier metaphor; "it's that big horse that ye're afther buyin' from Docthor Mangan; they say that he gave him to ye too cheap on the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... after a moment's thought. "If I thought I had been impertinent, I should at once apologise. But, sir, do you think it is part of my duty to allow any man, even my Commanding Officer, to—pardon the disgusting metaphor, it is not so disgusting as the action complained of—to spit in my soup, and take it without protest? Do ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... say that he came—or, rather, he might say—yes, he would say, hailed from the hills of Ethan Allen; and, in closing, treated the company to the tale of Ticonderoga. The glittering mouth of the Father of Waters was a beautiful metaphor which brought Colonol le Fay, of Louisiana, to his feet; and the Colonel said that really he did not know what to say. "Say that the Mississippi has more water in its mouth than ever you had!" roared Major Scuppernong, with great hilarity. The company laughed, and the Colonel sat down. When ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... here given makes no profession of absolute, verbal literalness. One can not transfer a metaphor bodily, head and horns, from one speech to another. The European had to invent a new name for the boomerang or accept the name by which the Australian called it. The Frenchman, struggling with the English language, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the discords, and some of the discords were never resolved. But in one case at least—in the case of Browning's poetry, and in very many cases in the art of music—out of the discords emerged at last a full melody of steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Perhaps this homely metaphor will suggest how to begin the practise of consecutive thinking, by which we mean welding a number of separate thought-links into a chain that will hold. Take one link at a time, see that each naturally belongs with the ones you link to it, and remember that a single ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... 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
... 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 work on their respective ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... which, as every body knows, distinguish your social character; nothing is said of the annual meeting of chemists, geologists, and mathematicians, so beneficial to the real interests of science, by making a turn for tumid metaphor and the love of display necessary ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of Newton,—and turning the newly discovered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... responsibility, is enabled to narrate his own spiritual struggles and to enunciate his deepest convictions, sometimes, when they are likely to offend his readers, with a pretense of disapproval. The Clothes metaphor (borrowed from Swift) sets forth the central mystical or spiritual principle toward which German philosophy had helped Carlyle, the idea, namely, that all material things, including all the customs and forms of society, such as government and formalized religion, are ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... men must not write like women! That I cannot stand." He could not help being disgusted by their tricks, their sly coquetry, their sentimentality, which seemed to expend itself by preference upon creatures hardly worthy of interest, their style crammed with metaphor, their love-making and sensuality, their ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... characters of their masters and mistresses; nay, sometimes, which is still more absurd, introduced with more wit than the poet has to bestow upon their principals.—Mere flints and steels to strike fire with—or, to vary the metaphor, to serve for whetstones to wit, which, otherwise, could not be made apparent; or, for engines to be made use of like the machinery of the antient poets, (or the still more unnatural soliloquy,) to help on a sorry plot, or to bring about a ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... a taste for metaphor, was pleased with this, and said, 'Very good, Toots! Very well said, indeed, Toots!' and nodded his head and patted his hands. Mr Feeder made in reply, a comic speech chequered with sentiment. Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A., was afterwards very happy on Doctor and Mrs Blimber; Mr Feeder, B.A., scarcely ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... brunt of the late ambassador's malice, and to engage at a little later period in hottest controversy with him, personal and political. "Why should van der Myle strut about, with his arms akimbo like a peacock?" complained Aerssens one day in confused metaphor. A question not easy to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to any penalty: lit. *'I assess my own penalty at anything'—a metaphor from the practice of the law-courts, which allowed a convicted prisoner to propose an alternative penalty to that suggested ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... and his three companions were gambolling round the ship like so many porpoises—or dolphins, if they would prefer the latter metaphor—enjoying to the full the invigorating luxury of their bath in the cool, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... himantopus is taken from Pliny; and, by an awkward metaphor, implies that the legs are as slender and pliant as if cut out of a thong of leather. Neither Willughby nor Ray, in all their curious researches either at home or abroad, ever saw this bird. Mr. Pennant never met with it in all Great Britain, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... in its manifold beauty—surrounds the Menorah in Hebraic literature and tradition. Both the single light or candle, and the distinctive combination of seven, are the favorite objects of metaphor, interpretation, and poetic sentiment. In the Bible the word "ner" ([Hebrew: nun-resh; Transliteration: ner])—candle or light, embodied, of course, in the word Menorah ([Hebrew: mem-nun-vav-resh-hey; Transliteration: menorah])—is ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... question. In the oldest form of the story, the Sanskrit, a handful of earth turns into a mountain, a cup of water into a river. Now, metaphorically speaking, a brush may be taken as a miniature wood; the common use of the term brushwood is a proof of the general acceptance of the metaphor. A comb does not at first sight appear to resemble a mountain, but its indented outline may have struck the fancy of many primitive peoples as being a likeness to a serrated mountain range. Thence comes it that in German Kamm means not only a comb but also (like the Spanish ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... "Metaphor and simile apart, there is work for a twelve-month to any man to read such a book, and for half a lifetime to digest it, and I am glad to see it ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... 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 ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... take 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 jackal roaming ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... shaken as to my first decision. Was I wise, I asked myself, to trust all my eggs (forgive, Sir ALEC BLACK, the poorness of this metaphor) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... other side of a wall!" Was it but the metaphor-making of dreams, which will so often take our forgotten speculations and dramatise them for us into reality, or was it indeed a message? An instinct which was unamenable to reason, and which was perhaps only a desire, told him it was a ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... I have said, the instructor of your choice. When I had yet remained neglected in the world, when my honours were withered by the hand of poverty, when my blossoms appeared in the eyes of those who saw me of the most brown and wintery complexion, and, if your lordship will allow me to finish the metaphor, when I stank in their noses, it was then that your lordship remarked and distinguished me. Your bounty it was that first revived my native pride. It is true that it ran in a little dribbling rivulet, but still it was much to me. Even before you were able to afford ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... selected this tradition out of many, as, allowing for metaphor, it appears to be a very correct epitome of the history of the Shoshones in former times. The very circumstance of their acknowledging that they were, for a certain period, slaves to that race of people who built the cities, the ruins of ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... has no sense. Power that is earned is never ridiculous, but power in the hands of one who is strange to it is first funny, then fussy, and soon pathetic. Punk is a useful substance, and only serves as metaphor when it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... hang bells everywhere," a metaphor from the bells which were attached to horses' trappings on ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... not spend much time in considering the arguments advanced against the figurative interpretation by Credner (S. 27 ff.), Hitzig, and others. They all rest upon an almost incomprehensible ignoring of the nature of poetry, of the metaphor, and of the allegory. Thus, e.g., Credner says, "What man of sound sense will ever be able to say of horses, horsemen and warriors, that they resemble horses and horsemen? Who has ever seen horses and horsemen climbing over walls? What shall we say concerning chap. ii. 20? Do land armies ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... unaffected by time perhaps; and like some ceremonial usage among men that has long ceased to have any significance, or like a fragment of ancient history, or a tradition, which in the course of time has received some new and false interpretation. The false interpretation, to continue the metaphor, is, in this case, that the purpose of the animal in going to a certain spot, to which it has probably never previously resorted, is to die there. A false interpretation, because, in the first place, it is incredible that an instinct of no advantage to the species, in its struggle ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... simplicity that is in Christ. God himself, in some sense, is said to be jealous, [5991]"I am a jealous God, and will visit:" so Psalm lxxix. 5. "Shall thy jealousy burn like fire for ever?" But these are improperly called jealousies, and by a metaphor, to show the care and solicitude they have of them. Although some jealousies express all the symptoms of this which we treat of, fear, sorrow, anguish, anxiety, suspicion, hatred, &c., the object only varied. That of some fathers is very eminent, to their sons and heirs; for though they love them ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and of course transferring pollen, in recompense, as they journey on. A more credulous generation imported the plant for its alleged healing virtues. What is the significance of its Greek name, meaning a lion's tail? Let no one suggest, by a far-stretched metaphor, that our grandmothers, in Revolutionary days, enjoyed pulling it to vent ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... such as "He's a stud-horse," and "Put the kybosh on 'em," and many more that have escaped my memory. But the Boy Orator's peroration I am glad to remember, for his fervid convictions lifted him into the domain of metaphor and cadence; and though to be sure I made due allowance for enthusiasm, his picture of Arizona remained vivid with me, and I should have voted to make the Territory a State that ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... enough 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, as ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... meaningless, and you scarcely notice it, but the haphazard and indiscriminate way, quite regardless of any meaning, in which he interlards ordinary sentences with beastly words, at first revolts you. Lying he treats with the same large charity. To lie like a trooper is quite a sound metaphor. He invents all sorts of elaborate lies for the mere pleasure of inventing them. He will come back from headquarters and tell you of the last despatch which he has just read with his own eyes (a victory or disaster, according to his mood at the ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... to my buzzom at once," said Bill, speaking figuratively, but Christine instinctively shrank nearer Dennis. In talking with men, Bill used the off-hand vernacular of his calling, but when addressing ladies, he evidently thought that a certain style of metaphor bordering on sentiment was the proper thing. But Christine said, "As a friend of Mr. Fleet's you shall join our party at once"; and she led them to the further end of the room, where at a table sat Dr. Arten, Professor and Mrs. Leonard, Ernst, and ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... To drop the metaphor, while he was searching for the origins of the deities a few centuries before the Christian era began, I was finding their more or less larval forms flourishing more than twenty centuries before the commencement ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... prose, and will undoubtedly prove one of the United's most entertaining writers. Misses Kline and McGeoch both exhibit marked poetical tendencies in prose, the latter writer having something of Mr. Fritter's facility in the use of metaphor. Mr. Porter's editorials are refreshingly naive and unaffected. His grammar is generally good, except in the one sentence where he speaks of the Toledo Times. He should say, "the newspaper which has given me much experience, and to whose ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design. Asa Gray and some others look at each variation, or at least at each beneficial variation (which A. Gray would compare with the rain drops (Dr. Gray's rain-drop metaphor occurs in the Essay 'Darwin and his Reviewers' ('Darwiniana,' page 157): "The whole animate life of a country depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain. The moisture is furnished by the ocean, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... compassionate sigh. He sought to warn him, but Cesarini listened to him with such impatience that he resigned the office of monitor. He wrote to De Montaigne, who succeeded no better. Cesarini was bent on playing his own game. And to one game, without a metaphor, he had at last come. His craving for excitement vented itself at Hazard, and his remaining guineas ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... question of time when he would be President of the new corporation. I can see now the smile that lighted up his rather handsome face when he told me. He was "monkeying with a buzz-saw" all the same if he did but know it, and yet he always professed to follow the metaphor that he could "throw off the belt" that drove the pulley at his own good pleasure and so stop the connecting machinery before the teeth of the whirling blade could reach his fingers. Should it get beyond his control—of ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which could not be clearly accounted for, or altered any judgment except by distinct reasons. As a writer, his style, though wholly without grace, was admirable in its lucidity. He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain fragmentary and occasional character, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... was at last produced, and was not so good as the ordinary schoolgirl's essay. It was feeble, without metaphor, without point, without illustration. She did not dare ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... scientific services rendered to the Indian Government; and recently he has added to his many accomplishments the rarer merit among men of that love of worth in others, which culminates in human brotherhood. His words of appropriate Oriental metaphor, in writing to the family, that his sense of personal loss in the man with whom he had for years, in the wildest solitudes and the most prolonged hardships, eaten "bread and salt" together, made it difficult for him to say all he felt, were emphasised by the human grief he could not repress at ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... simplify them in some way? At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now. Would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to have said, what I would have said if I had realised at the moment that I was talking to you, is this. We are living the kind of life comparable to that of the people whose cottages are built round the edge of the crater of an active volcano, liable to erupt at any moment; or, to change the metaphor, our position bears a certain resemblance to that of the careless workman who smokes a pipe on the top of a barrel of blasting powder, and if we're not extremely careful we'll find ourselves scattered about in little bits, like the boy who stood on ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... contained seems to be borne out upon a closer examination. On the threshold of this new poetic world of personality stands the Poet of the poem significantly called "Transcendentalism," who is speaking to another poet about the too easily obvious, metaphor-bare philosophy of his opus in twelve books. That the admonishing poet is stationed there at the very door-sill of the Gallery of Men and Women is surely not accidental, even if Browning's habit of plotting his groups of poems ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... career, he rashly involved himself in the Catholic question. It was a showy topic for a young orator; it was an easy exhibition of cheap patriotism; it gave an opportunity for boundless metaphor—and it meant nothing. But, no politician has ever sinned with Popery but under a penalty—the question hung about his neck through every hour of his political existence. It encumbered his English popularity, it alienated ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... never seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living; they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the metaphor) they weld life's happenings, their memories, their emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I, harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end and striving bravely towards it. Or there is over-unification and fanaticism, with narrow aim and little sympathy for other ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... calls it that thing which in its own bosom receives forms and ideas; by which metaphor he denotes matter, being (as it were) a nurse or receptacle of beings. Aristotle, that it is the ultimate superficies of the circumambient body, contiguous to that which it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... thought of the unity of life between Jesus Christ and all that believe upon Him is the familiar teaching of Scripture, and is set forth by other emblems besides that of the vine, the queen of the vegetable world; for we have it in the metaphor of the body and its members, where not only are the many members declared to be parts of one body, but the name of the collective body, made up of many members, is Christ. 'So also is'— not as we might expect, 'the Church,' but—'Christ,' the whole bearing the name ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... and sceptered or princess born in the purple. It pleased him to write bad poems to her as his Infanta, his royal rose, his pomegranate flower, his nestling eagle waiting for strength to fly upward to the sun—all with halting feet and strained metaphor. He drew pictures of her by the dozen, mostly symbolic and all out of drawing, but expressive of his admiration, his hope, his respect; while to Leam he was little better than a two-legged talking dog whose knowledge interested and whose goodness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... Pearce, is a work of a flavor or timbre (or however else we may metaphor the quality too subtle to define) so delicate that it may escape recognition for a time. In this it only meets the fate of all really superior art. The 'Drolls' are short, abrupt, fantastic stories, beautiful to read from their deep imagination and haunting in their allegorical depth.... ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... depression in the moral atmosphere. Five minutes before we had been much elated. The spring round-up of cattle was over; we had sold our bunch of steers at the top price; the money lay in our small safe; we had been talking of a modest celebration as we rode home over the foothills. Now, to use the metaphor of a cow county, we had been brought up with a sharp turn! Our prosperity, measured by the ill-fortune of a fellow- countryman, dwindled. Ajax summed up the situation: "He made ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor, you can always cut them ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... into the Roman camp."—Ib., p. 39. "The pupil may now write a description of the following objects. A school room. A steam boat. A writing desk. A dwelling house. A meeting house. A paper mill. A grist mill. A wind mill."—Ib., p. 45. "Every metaphor should be founded on a resemblance which is clear and striking; not far fetched, nor difficult to be discovered."—Ib., p. 49. "I was reclining in an arbour overhung with honey suckle and jessamine of the most exquisite fragrance."—Ib., p. 51. "The author of the following extract is speaking ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... men in human records who seem to have been made famous solely that they might be infamous. He sold his own country, he oppressed ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and has saddled two separate and sensible nations with the horrible mixed metaphor called the Union. Here there is no possible see-saw of sympathies as there can be between Brutus and Caesar or between Cromwell and Charles I.: there is simply nobody who supposes that Emmet was out for worldly gain, or that Castlereagh ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... art is what metaphor is in speech. It is the representation to the eye of an object which suggests ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... grind of his character producing a flash. But 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 through his brain with ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... of Boaz's shop resound to the boastful recollections of young men. Boaz had changed. He had become not only different, but opposite. A metaphor will do best. The spirit of Boaz Negro had been a meadowed hillside giving upon the open sea, the sun, the warm, wild winds from beyond the blue horizon. And covered with flowers, always hungry and thirsty for the sun and the fabulous ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Personally, he exulted in his conduct to the end of his life, and took pleasure in watching and recording Deane's disreputable career and miserable end. "As he rose like a rocket, so he fell like the stick," a metaphor which has passed into a proverb, was imagined by Paine to meet Deane's case. [1] The immediate consequence of Paine's resignation was to oblige him to hire himself out as clerk to an attorney in Philadelphia. In his office, Paine earned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... 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 of Hosts ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... subject-matter, it is not much of a love-song, that sentiment not being one of its chief inspirations. The Saxon imagination was inflamed chiefly by the religious and the heroic in war. As to its handling, it abounded in metaphor and periphrasis, suggestive images, and parables ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee |
