"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moved by Franklin's humorous and yet moving appeal, came forward to subscribe their names, Franklin drew the attention of some of the members to the fact that on the back of the President's chair was the half disk of a sun, and, with his love of metaphor, he said that painters had often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... is dark And silent as the moon, &c The same metaphor will recur, Canto V. v. 29. Into a place I came ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... to me she fumbled the ball, to employ a sporting metaphor. She bowed to me—like this—and smiled at me—like that!" Her cool, patronizing nod and the sudden contraction and relaxation of Nan's facial muscles brought a wry smile to old Daney's stolid countenance. "Even if I felt that I could afford to or was forced to accept reimbursement ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... Pocock; he could have talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She HAD been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... experience teaches that "union is strength." Nor is it even based on the philosophical conception of the incompleteness of the individual life. As Dr Sanday finely says, "If the church is in something more than mere metaphor the Body of Christ, if there is circulating through it a continual flow and return of spiritual forces, derived directly from him, if the Spirit which animates the Body is one, then the Body itself ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... of Pixley, so I say of you: "The prison yawns before you, The turnkey stalks behind!" Now will you go? Or lag, and let that functionary floor you? To change the metaphor—you seem to be Between Judge Wallace and the ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... know, reflected from without—only throws a transient glimpse of my own image on the surface of the dark water; that image itself broken and renewed as the water boils up from its hidden fountain. Or, if I may recur to your own metaphor, instead of hearing in those deep caverns the clear oracles of which you boast, I can distinguish nothing but a scarcely audible murmur; I know not whether it be any thing more than the lingering echoes of what I heard in my childhood: or, rather, my soul speaks to me on all these ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... a metaphor. I develop in this pamphlet my belief that a convict, once he has expiated his offence, should upon his release be restored to the precise position in society which he held before ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... pleasant to Horace to find even one among his friends illustrating in his life this modest Socratic creed; for he is so constantly enforcing it, in every variety of phrase and metaphor, that while we must conclude that he regarded it as the one doctrine most needful for his time, we must equally conclude that he found it utterly disregarded. All round him wealth, wealth, wealth, was the universal aim: wealth, to build fine ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... at the matter was beginning to take form: had hung about her mind and forsaken it more than once. Might it not be better, after all, to dash at the position and capture it while her forces were well under control? To pursue the metaphor, the commissariat might not hold out. Better endure the ills we have—of course, Rosalind knew all that—than fly to others that we know not of. But suppose we have a chance of flying to others we can measure the length and breadth of, and staving off thereby an uncalculable ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... sticking up all over his head, and his breath coming and going very hard and short, the busy Pancks fell back a step (in Tug metaphor, took half a turn astern) as if to show his dingy hull complete, then forged a-head again, and directed his quick glance by turns into his hat where his note-book was, and ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... to 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 they were, if they are before me at this moment, ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... incomprehensible to me. Cannot you 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 and allegory?" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... translation 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, told a lady he was gangrened, he meant he was mortified. The ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... by his ignorance of metaphor, but reflecting that possibly the figures of rhetoric were not used in that country—"I mean the oppression, the slavery under which your people groan, their bond-age to the tyrannical trusts, entailing poverty, unrequited ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... is certainly a bird that 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
... insipid fiction I can call to mind in the Orlando Furioso is that of the "swans" who rescue "medals" from the river of oblivion (canto xxxv.). It betrays a singular forgetfulness of the poet's wonted verisimilitude; for what metaphor can reconcile us to swans taking an interest in medals? Popular belief had made them singers; but it was not a wise step ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... represents the great universe as turned to his small set of Pan's pipes and all the more because he feels that, conceal it as he will, those same Pan's pipes are out of tune with each other. And so arises the habit of impersonating nature, not after the manner of Spenser (whose purity of metaphor and philosophic method, when he deals with nature, is generally even more marvellous than the richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... be it. I see you take my metaphor. You are a painter; you have a glorious future, a rich future before you. But ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... the Poet for his morning Sup Fills with a Metaphor his mental Cup, Do you devoutly read your Manuscripts That Someone may, before you ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... in the system of the world as that vapoury spectre? The God in whom we live and move and have our being must be far more all-pervasive, more incognisable by the souls of men, who doubt not for one moment of His presence and His power. Except for purposes of rhetoric the metaphor that seemed so clever fails. Nor, when once such thoughts have been stirred in us by such a sight, can we do better than repeat Goethe's sublime profession of a philosophic mysticism. This translation I made one morning on the Pasterze Gletscher ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... it sank below the skyline, and that was the last I saw of Grace Carrington for many a day, while breathing hard I watched the horseman grow smaller across the prairie. Her father sometimes delighted to speak in metaphor, and I could not fail to recognize that it was a plain hint he had, perhaps in grim kindness, given me. For a moment I wondered whether I should have made him listen in turn, and I was glad I had ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Encyclopaedia and learned that "Thothmes II" was an Egyptian king of the XVIIIth dynasty, whose dessicated mummy had recently been disinterred from the hot sands of the desert, he naturally stopped his subscription to the paper. The metaphor apparently tickled Page, for he used it in a series of articles which have become immortal in the political annals of North Carolina. These have always been known as the "Mummy letters." They furnished a vivid ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... speech which we may sometimes have recourse to. The metaphors and facons de parler to which even in the plainest speech we are perpetually recurring (as, for example, in this last two lines, "plain," "perpetually," and "recurring," are all words based on metaphor, and hence more or less liable to mislead) often deceive us, as though there were nothing more than what we see and say, and as though words, instead of being, as they are, the creatures of our convenience, ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... a rainy day at last at Kinlossie House. Such days will come at times in human experience, both in metaphor and fact. At present ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... now there, and when our guest took it up even the gloomiest faces brightened. We broke the sacred wafer, then we emptied the first glasses. My industrious scullion had been deeply moved by a folk-song from the Ukraine, one of those songs rich in poetical feeling and simple metaphor which go straight to the heart; he therefore got up to make the welcoming speech, and, encouraged by the tears of joy which rose in the eyes of our guest, he quite took possession of him. He told him that he and I had worked uninterruptedly for two days and nights in the sweat ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... be the "One Religion," as a recent Bampton Lecturer termed it, too often forgets that his system is a recomposition of rays of a religious light which was decomposed in the prismatic minds of earlier men. And further, with a change of metaphor, if Christianity has flourished and fructified through eighteen centuries, it must not be denied that it is a graft upon an old stock which through fifteen previous centuries had borne abundant fruit. The same course must be adopted still. We find men everywhere ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... this book, however, though often permitted to essay-writers for the relief of their dulness, I never mean to take more,—the relation of composed metaphor as of actual dream, pp. 23 and 104. I assumed, it is true, that in these places the supposed dream would be easily seen to be an invention; but must not any more, even under so transparent disguise, pretend to any share in the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... "'Ware metaphor!" cried someone at my elbow. I turned and saw Missy Blades. She'd come quietly into the lounge and started mixing ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... that the Duke was quite candid. I have used in the concluding paragraph of my present book precisely the same argument as you have, even bringing in the bulldog,[63] with respect to variations not having been specially ordained. Your metaphor of the river[64] is new to me, and admirable; but your other metaphor, in which you compare classification and complex machines, does not seem to me quite appropriate, though I cannot point out what seems deficient. The point which seems to me strong is that ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... you, 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 ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Surely the field of fame is wide enough for all; and if it were not, I would not willingly rob my neighbour of a rood of it. Now you have a pretty property of some thousand acres there, and when you have passed your present Inclosure Bill, your income will be doubled, (there's a metaphor, worthy of a Templar, namely, pert and low,) while my wild common is too remote to incommode you, and quite incapable of such fertility. I send you (which return per post, as the printer would say) a curious ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... all our total past. Much of this past, indeed most of it, only endures as unconscious Memory, but it is always capable of coming to the apex of the cone, i.e., coming into consciousness. So we may say that there are different planes of Memory, conic sections, if we keep up the original metaphor, and the largest of these contains all our past. This may be well described as "the plane of dream."[Footnote: See Matter and Memory, p. 222 (Fr. p. 186) and the paper L'Effort intellectuel, Revue philosophique, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... occasionally, when writing for some Review in which a very violent departure from the English language would not be advisable,) far above all criticism. The attempt to censure the oddities with which it abounds—the frequent repetition—the metaphor and allusion used again and again till the page is covered with a sort of slang—would only subject the critic himself to the same kind of ridicule that would fall upon the hapless wight who should bethink him of taking some Shandean work ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... that he was (to vary the metaphor) loading the ship of state with a necessary ballast, whereas in truth he was disturbing its balance and preventing it from sailing free. He succeeded in imbuing both men of property and the mass of the "plain people" with the idea that ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... with a view to the expensive toupet), but the mention of the arrival of the Mozart now decided him. He intended anyhow before he went home for lunch to stroll past The Hurst, and see if he did not hear—to adopt a mixed metaphor—the sound of the diligent practice of that classical morsel going on inside. Probably the soft pedal would be down, but he had marvellously acute hearing, and he would be very much surprised if he did not hear the recognisable chords, and even more surprised ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief—not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... 28. 4. That in the visible Church now under the New Testament, there is a government settled; for besides Apostles, Prophets, and Teachers, here is mention of another sort of officer distinct from them all, called, in the abstract, Governments, a metaphor from pilots, mariners, or shipmasters, who by their helm, card, or compass, cables, and other tacklings, guide, and order, turn and twine the ship as necessity shall require; so these officers called Governments, have a power of governing and steering the spiritual vessel of the Church; ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... persons into the final scene, with some loss of liveliness and a concomitant gain in unity of effect. He modernized his dialogue entirely, bringing up to date the usage and allusions of his original, and restraining the richness of its metaphor by removing the figures altogether or by substituting others more familiar. He omitted a good deal of bawdry, especially in Act II, scene ii. All these changes have parallels in other Restoration adaptations. Again, the songs and dances, which are all of Harris's composition, reflect the demand ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... put the matter in a nutshell and to descend from metaphor to plain business facts, you can not organize a company and begin to operate the mine or rather group of mines, for the reason that you can not secure a clear title, and what is worse, you have not, so far, succeeded in finding any trace ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... I would too!" cried Newton, dropping from bold metaphor to vulgar vernacular. "Well, what's the third thing? ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... to shift the metaphor, are the treacherous by-paths of that admirably policed highway whereon the well-groomed and well-bitted Pegasi of Vanderhoffen and Charteris (in his later manner) trot stolidly and safely toward oblivion. And the result of wandering afield ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... which cannot be disturbed without both risk and useless toil. There are still edifices standing to which time has given a beauty and tradition a sanctity which newer creations cannot possess. They cannot be removed without irreparable loss. Like any other metaphor, that of rebuilding a city as compared with the action of a state, of a nation, after a time of change and trouble, is misleading if pressed too far. Progress for a nation must rather be the growth and development of a living organism adapting ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 were clothed ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... bowed down with awe unspeakable before a Higher in Heaven; such things especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being.' His father was a man of unusual force of character and gifted with a wonderful power of speech, flashing out in picturesque metaphor, in biting satire, in humorous comment upon life. He had, too, the Scotch genius for valuing education; and it was he who decided that Tom, whose character he had observed, should have every chance that schooling could give him. His mother was ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... made suitable replies, and Robert, his gift of golden speech moving him, spoke a little longer than the others. He made a free use of metaphor and allegory, telling how dear were the prosperity and happiness of the Hodenosaunee to his soul, and he felt every word he said. Charged with the thoughts and impressions of an Iroquois, the fourteen chiefs were the quintessence of ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... afternoon, memory, a pensive Ruth, went gleaning the silent fields of childhood, and found the scattered grain still golden, and the morning sunlight fresh and fair.—Curtis. [Footnote: In Ruth of this sentence, we have a type of the metaphor called Personification—a figure in which things are raised above their proper plane, taken up toward or to that of persons. Things take on dignity and importance as they rise in ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... laws of interpretation do not compel us, in cases like this, to receive the severest literal significance of a word as conveying the meaning which a popular doctrine holds in the minds of its believers. There is almost always looseness, vagueness, metaphor, accommodation. But take the term before us in its strictest sense, and mark the result. When a fire is extinguished, it is obvious that, while the flame has disappeared, the substance of the flame, whatever it was, has not ceased ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... better-taught labourers trying to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor, and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing circumspection which ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... The metaphor of a mirror does not wholly serve us here. When the sunbeams fall upon it, it flashes in the light, just because they do not enter its cold surface. It is a mirror, because it does not drink them up, but flings them back. The contrary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... more barren-sounding than utter Negation? Besides, where do we differ really? All of us who think at all agree more or less. We use different terms, pursue different lines of thought, that is all. It is only the dullard, who mistakes the symbol for the idea, the letter for the spirit, the metaphor for the thought within, who is a bigot. The true thinker is an artist, the true artist is a thinker, for Art is the expression of thought in thing. The highest thought, as Connie rightly told us before ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... on the floor of the retro-choir to John Johnson, master and mariner, dated 1737, is crowded with nautical metaphor. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... 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 ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... that an operatic figure invites to such a study as that which I have attempted in the case of Samson, and it may be that the side-wise excursion in which I have indulged invites criticism of the kind illustrated in the metaphor of using a club to brain a gnat. But I do not think so. If heroic figures seem small on the operatic stage, it is the fault of either the author or the actor. When genius in a creator is paired with genius in an interpreter, the hero of an opera is quite ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... short passage would be very obscure to the reader without an explanation from another of Cicero's treatises. The expression here, ad investigandum suem regiones vineae terminavit, which is a metaphor too bold, if it was not a sort of augural language, seems to me to have been the effect of carelessness in our great author; for Navius did not divide the regions, as he calls them, of the vine to find his sow, but to find ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... one by one to the Sultan, using most exalted eloquence, and employing every simile, metaphor, image, figure, and trope that language contains, in the vain attempt to express adequately the surpassing beauty of those ladies; yet he was most careful to set no one above any other and to distribute the said similes, metaphors, images, figures, and tropes, with absolute impartiality and equality ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... very special one of these concerts, dedicated to the meager purses of just these, and held in New York's super opera-house, the Amphitheater, a great bowl of humanity, the metaphor made perfect by tiers of seats placed upon the stage, rose from orchestra to dome. A gigantic cup of a Colosseum lined in stacks and stacks of faces. From the door of his dressing-room, leaning out, Leon Kantor could see a great segment of it, buzzing down into ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... army was considered as being still more masterly and eloquent, and it was certainly well suited to the taste of French soldiers, who, as Bourrienne remarks, are wonderfully pleased with grandiloquence, metaphor, and hyperbole, though they do not always understand what they mean. Even a French author of some distinction praises this address as something sublime. "The proclamation to the army," says he, "is full of energy: it could not fail to make ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Men who have come to help you in a heavy job of work need example. If you wish me to weep, be grieved yourself first of all. Soltikof angrily wipes his countenance at this point, and insists on a few tears from Daun. Without metaphor, Soltikof has shot away all his present ammunition, his staff of bread is quite precarious in these parts; and Soltikof thinks always, 'Is it my business, then, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... under the limitations and for the ends allowed in Scripture (these it is needless to repeat) he is glad to possess, observant to acquire, and careful to retain them. He considers them however, if we may again introduce the metaphor, like the precious metals, as having rather an exchangeable than an intrinsic value, as desirable not simply in their possession, but in their use. In this view, he holds himself to be responsible for that share of them which he enjoys, and, to continue the ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... 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 ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... the part of the author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of life; and turn from them to the modern novel, composed of scenery and word-pictures and metaphor and the dramatic situations, of which Scott is full. Invention may be displayed in such work, but there is no room for anything else. 'The romance after the manner of Scott is a mere passing fashion in literature,' you will say, and fulminate against ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... was brought on by two causes: 1. About ten years ago the Americans crossed the line and established themselves on Pelly River, where they carried on to an extraordinary extent the illicit traffic in intoxicating liquor to the Blackfeet. The fiery water flowed as freely, if I may use the metaphor, as the streams running from the Rocky Mountains, and hundreds of the poor Indians fell victims to the white man's craving for money, some poisoned, some frozen to death whilst in a state of intoxication, and many shot down by American bullets. 2. Then in 1870 came that disease ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... became quite intelligible that many Alexandrians should fear to fling a stone lest it might hit one of the good daemons of which the air was full—a spirit of light perhaps, or a protecting spirit. The more obscure their theories, the more were they overloaded with image and metaphor; all simplicity of statement was lost, and yet the disputants prided themselves on the brilliancy of their language and the wealth of their ideas. They believed that they had brought the transcendental within the grasp of intelligent sense, and that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seems to betray an inability to understand the ground principle on which party government depends. That principle, of course, is the loyal acceptance by each party on entering office of the completed legislation of its predecessors. To borrow a metaphor from the Roman lawyers, the hereditas may be damnosa, but the party succeeds thereto as a haeres necessarius. Any other rule would substitute anarchy for order, and an endless process of reversing the past for a ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... 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 ago, under the influence ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... it the power of developing into a complex organism." ("Heredity," Vol. I, p. 170.) Again he says: "There is, therefore, continuity of the germ-plasm from one generation to another. One might represent the germ-plasm by the metaphor of a long, creeping rootstock from which plants arise at intervals, these latter representing the individuals of successive generations. Hence it follows that the transmission of acquired characters is an impossibility, for if the germ-plasm is not formed ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... of God, God's own righteousness coming out of God's heart into human hearts. Ye shall be partakers of the divine nature. Ye shall be joint heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ, inheriting all that Christ inherited from His Father. Ye shall have the same spirit that was in Christ. Metaphor and trope and figure are exhausted in the endeavor of the apostle to set forth this sublime truth. Christ is the servant of God. We are the servants of God. He is the Son of God. We are the sons of God. He is the light of the world. We are the lights of the world. He is a priest forever. ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... sorts of out-of-the-way questions to take him off the scent (if I may be allowed to use your happy simile), and that then he suddenly gives him one between the eyes? A blow of the ax on his sinciput (if again I may be permitted to use your ingenious metaphor)? Hah, hah! And do you mean to say that when I spoke to you about quarters provided by the State, that—hah, hah! You are very caustic. But I won't revert to that again. By-and-by!—one remark produces another, one thought ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... gorgeous severity, and dragging a prize in her wake: no less than Rowley, with the cockade in his hat, and a smart pair of tops to his boots! When I said he was in the lady's wake I spoke but in metaphor. As a matter of fact he was squiring her, with the utmost dignity, on his arm; and I followed them up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make use of this Metaphor, to express that Faculty of the Mind, which distinguishes all the most concealed Faults and nicest Perfections in Writing. We may be sure this Metaphor would not have been so general in all Tongues, had there not been a very great Conformity between that Mental Taste, which is the Subject of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... or persuading, or even threatening, they rely largely on indirect appeals, on analogy, simile, and metaphor, flavoured with a good deal of humour of a rather heavy kind. Or they may convey a strong hint by describing a professed dream in which the circumstances under ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... part. "Now, gentlemen," he said to his officers, "let us do something to-day which the world may talk of hereafter." Collingwood, in reality, was a great man and a great seaman, and in the battle which followed he "fought like an angel," to quote the amusingly inappropriate metaphor ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... 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 own ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... The metaphor was not exactly happy, for at that instant the unlucky man received full in his face a broadside of gravel thrown by the hoofs of a horse which had been frightened by the flourishing stick, and which had responded to the ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... money than wit; and I paid you very cheerfully for the accommodations that you afforded me, for which I was very grateful; but the case is altered, I have now more wit than money, little as the former may be. To speak without metaphor, since I was last your prisoner, I have had many a hard tug at any purse in my endeavours to support my independence: prudence, therefore, compels me to remain within the walls, and to forego (however reluctantly) your proffered kindness." Mr. Jones took me by the hand, and looking me steadily ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... press. Linked Spheres is a splendid muddle—very indefinite, quite void of connection with the subject in hand, and with a pleasant tinkle about the sound, just like Gladstone's speeches! Linked Spheres! It's impossible, for how the deuce would you link a sphere? Metaphor all wrong, and no one will know in the least what you mean, but it sounds pleasant and polished, and perfectly proper, and you'll find your editor will swallow ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... timidly. It was her first 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, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... although Tourneur sometimes obtains a lurid and ghastly tragic intensity which more than equals Ford when at his best; and Marston, in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes has touches of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings of metaphor worthy of Webster. But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... of carrying on the metaphor so well, and of asking the question so delicately. It was quite evident he had been in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... a turn about the room, pulling down his waistcoat and contemplating its outward slope with a smile. "Oh, I've got more friends than I can shake a stick at. And with pleasure at the helm, goodness is a drug in the market,—if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor. Look here, Marcia," he added, severely. "If you like the Hallecks, all well and good; I sha'n't interfere with you; but they bore me. I outgrew Ben Halleck years ago. He's duller than death. As for the old people, there's no harm in them,—though they're bores, too,—nor ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... and I know it takes nearly that time for a well-brought-up young lady to get over a real matrimonial disappointment. However, shy or not shy, they certainly ought to be explicit. It's too bad to miss a chance because we cannot interpret the metaphor in which some bashful swain thinks it decorous to couch his proposals; and I once knew a young lady who, happening to dislike needlework, and replying in the negative to the insidious question, "Can you sew a button?" never knew ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... of life, &c. As iron is softened at the forge and beaten into shape on the anvil, so by the trials and circumstances of life, our thoughts and actions are influenced and our characters and destinies decided. The metaphor is made more complicated ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... form beside the tedious prolixity of the Arcadia, or the chaotic effusions of Nash. The weariness, which the modern reader feels for the romance of Lyly, is due rather to the excessive quantity of its metaphor, which was the fault of the age, than ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... course, Shakespeare never pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra. This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's own heart and draw from oneself impulses as profound as possible with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image. Yet I fear that to ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... that 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 ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... much quoted at the time of its publication is a good specimen of Mr. Brougham's forcible style of illustration: "He was guilty of no error—he was chargeable with no exaggeration—he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said, that all we can see about us, King, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system and its varied workings, end simply in bringing twelve good men into a box." In the same month, Mr. Brougham spoke at great length in support of Lord ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various
... orator, provided he is elegant and not bold in the matter of making words, and modest in his metaphors, and sparing in his use of obsolete terms, and humble in the rest of his ornaments of words and sentences, will perhaps indulge in a tolerably frequent use of that kind of metaphor which is common in the ordinary conversation, not only of city people, but even of rustics; since they too are in the habit of saying, "that the vines sparkle with jewels," "that the fields are thirsty," "that the corn-fields are rejoicing," "that the ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... immeasurable 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... further into whole chapters of instructions, with scarcely a reply from the passive pupil. It is needless to point out the extreme difference between this strain of continued didactics, rather encumbered than enlivened by a starting metaphor, which, generally quite lost sight of, the author recollects every now and then, as if by accident—and the thoroughly life-like manner in which John Bunyan puts the adventures of his pilgrim before us. Two circumstances alone strike us as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... to pay emphatic honour to a man, to praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, the strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals in silent mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 know, the only form and nature ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... 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 ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Cooper; or upon 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 ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... I'm conservative, doctor, but I'm glad you're consistent. She did send another valentine. I am afraid she strained this figure of speech about the boat. But when everything in the world depends on one metaphor, it will not do to be fastidious. Jennie drew again the little boat with misspelt name. And this time she added five words: 'The ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... thunder bellow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning, like a snakes tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory —knows, in Nature's language, what Pindar teaches with the voice of Art. It is only by a metaphor like this that any attempt to realize the Sturm and Drang of Pindar's style can be communicated. As an artist he combines the strong flight of the eagle, the irresistible force of the torrent, the richness of Greek wine, and the majestic pageantry of Nature ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Constantia, gazing abstractedly out the window, "of 'winter lingering in the lap of spring,' though the metaphor is not in the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... that the statue "could not fail to be ridiculous in the expanse of New York Bay."[A] It is not necessary to touch upon the question of courtesy at all, but it is possible that one of our critics may live to regret his vegetable metaphor, and the other to revise his prematurely positive censure. There is a sketch in charcoal which represents the Bartholdi colossus as the artist has seen it in his mind's eye, standing high above the waters of the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... have fitted much better. And with his blonde head, which the dampness had merely made to wave a little more, for his thickly plaited straw hat had somewhat protected it from a thorough wetting, she might even have called him a young Viking, without any very great misuse of metaphor; Timothy was so thoroughly of the outdoors in his appearance, with all ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... Mexican poem refers to? Dr. Brinton himself feels that one must not credit the Aztecs "with finer feelings than they deserve;" and with reference to a certain mythic conception he adds, "I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender passion, with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor." Moreover, as he informs us, the Mexican root of the word is not derived from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and later signification. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her. 80 One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,— A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on; What boots all your grist? it can never be ground Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round; (Or, if 'tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor, And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore, Or lug in some stuff about water "so dreamily,"— It is not a metaphor, though, 'tis a simile); A lily, perhaps, would set my mill a-going, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... metaphorically," said Mr. Cargill. "If ye cannot understand a simple metaphor, ye cannot ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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 from ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color 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 body is with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not to encourage laudation, adulation, or encomium, or even praise. These can wait. The cow, to change the metaphor, will generally give her milk all the better if she is not in the act of being stroked or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... command, and put an end to the supremacy she then exercised alike by sea and by land, proceeded from that night, in which Pelopidas not surprising any fort, or castle, or citadel, but coming, the twelfth man, to a private house, loosed and broke, if we may speak truth in metaphor, the chains of the Spartan sway, which before seemed ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... man's conceit out of him. He was a miserable wretch, so worthless at his best as to deserve everlasting perdition. If he was to be saved at all, he could be saved only by the unmerited grace of God. In himself he was a child of the devil; and hell, not in metaphor, but in hard and palpable fact, inevitably waited for him. This belief, or the affectation of this belief, continues to be professed, but without a realisation of its tremendous meaning. The form of words is repeated by multitudes ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... articles on modern French painters was entertained by both publisher and editor. Mr. Seeley wrote: "I was rather in hopes that my vague suggestion of a subject might take root in your mind and develop into something definite; or, to change the metaphor, that it might be a spark to kindle your invention. I think such a series would be interesting here, and would furnish ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... phrase "set up my rest" is a metaphor from the once fashionable game of Primero, meaning, to stand upon the cards you have in your hand, in hopes they may prove better than those of your adversary. Hence, to make up your mind, to be ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Himself is happy, the holy Angels are happy, in whose defect the Devils are unhappy, that dare I call happiness; whatsoever {118} conduceth unto this may with an easy Metaphor deserve that name; whatsoever else the World terms Happiness, is to me a story out of Pliny, a tale of Boccace or Malizspini, an apparition, or neat delusion, wherein there is no more of Happiness than the name. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... all the counties of England being interested spectators; the hounds in good condition—very skilful whips— everything seemed to promise a fine day's sport: and what would have been the issue is not very easy to foresee, had it not been for what I may be allowed to term (pursuing the metaphor) the very unfortunate riding of the gentleman who, upon that occasion, acted as huntsman. It appears from his own statement at the outset that he had very little previous acquaintance with the country; but he went off with very considerable confidence ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... The bibulous metaphor is here reversible. It possessed mutuality, so to say. Cally herself would drown trouble to-night with intoxicating draughts of human society. But there came a time when this resource was denied her; ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... in voluble Yiddish, and made Esther wince again under the impassioned invective on her clumsiness. The old beldame expended enough oriental metaphor on the accident to fit up a minor poet. If the family died of starvation, their blood would ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... DASEINS. Ihres refers to Geschlechter. To make it refer to Gtter (and adopting the variant reading sie [i.e., Gtter] instead of sich) makes an impossible metaphor, since the picture of a chain with its links cannot describe the eternal and changeless life of the gods, but only human life, generation following generation as link on link in a chain. Compare 31, where Goethe has used Wellen with ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... jargon, like the 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 ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... shall only be removed by extravagant speculations, the ruinous consequences of which will not be perceived, or will be neglected, for the trifling advantages of the moment? and to make use of an energetic, but true metaphor, one that is terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... 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, ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... of our problem we should clearly distinguish between the various forms of imagination. It reveals itself not merely in art and literature, in fantastic conception, in personification and metaphor, but in every important department of human life. It is the tap-root of progress, as Mr. Lowell well points out. It pictures an ideal life in advance of the actual, which ideal becomes the object of effort. The forms of imagination may, therefore, be classified according to the sphere ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick |
