"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discountenance nagging is 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
... religious character of the grandmother exerted on the intellectual character of her descendant. The nobility of the humble family from which he sprung was derived evidently from this source. That character, to borrow a homely but forcible metaphor from Burns, was the sustaining 'stalk of carle hemp' which bore it up and kept it from grovelling on the depressed level of its condition. How very interesting a subject of thought and inquiry! A little Highland girl, when tending cattle in the fields nearly a century ago, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... "My metaphor was not out of place. Do you imagine horses are the only animals a man drives, mon beau cousin? Some men drive the woman who belongs to them, and that not with the lightest bit, I promise you. Nor do they forget to tie blood-knots ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the nineteenth century, find themselves compelled to use an oxygen and nitrogen generator made in Holland and mounted with Chinese apparatus; withal, lacquered and decorated with the art of to-day. To change from metaphor to matter of fact, modern "pure Shint[o]" is mainly a mass of speculation and philosophy, with a tendency of which the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... some of the characteristics of Saxon poetry. As to its 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
... be allowed 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 ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... is not unusual in the tongue, as 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
... which condense entire sentences into syllables. And in other cases, where custom allows us to express thoughts by single words, as in Beware, Heigho, Fudge, much force would be lost by expanding them into specific propositions. Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is, to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... without farther metaphor, I am afraid this new production, in which your generosity seems willing to give me some concern, will stand much in need of apology, since you think proper to begin your defence before the case is on trial.-The story is hastily huddled up, I will ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... fragment asserting, with vivid metaphor, at the same time the fragility of man's frame and the majesty of man's nature. This ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... from the toils and honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ran on for an hour, a crude homily full of rude metaphor, with little of sentiment or pleading, severely didactic, mandatory as if spoken in a dungeon of the Inquisition. When Red Dick passed the hat among the congregation for a subscription to build a church, the contribution was general ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... 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 an ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... was, that our civilian pursuits offered no criterion upon which to base forecasts of our ability as acrobats. There was J. B., for example. He knew a mixed metaphor when he saw one, for he had had wide experience with them as an English instructor at a New England "prep" school. But he had never done a barrel turn, or anything resembling it. How was he to know ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... his conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids, at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he replied to Laplace, in the Council of State be held his own against Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the chicanery ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... principal citizens 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 ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 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 ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... in discovering in the plays themselves (few examples have as yet been translated and I may be misled by accident or the idiosyncrasy of some poet) a playing upon a single metaphor, as deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting. In the 'Nishikigi' the ghost of the girl-lover carries the cloth she went on weaving out of grass when she should have opened the chamber door to her ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... new blue dressing-gown the doctor had brought, was in another world—a land of trope and key and metaphor. For the last ten minutes he had kept a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper working, and now the strident tones of his too long neglected concertina stirred the heavy air and shocked the birds outside to silence. The instrument was wheezy, for in addition to the sacrilege ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... to the people of Dry Bottom he had announced in a quiet, unostentatious paragraph that while he had not come to Dry Bottom for a free fight, he would permit no one to tread on his toes. His readers' comprehension of the metaphor was complete—as was evidenced by the warm hand-clasps which he received from citizens who were not in sympathy with the Dunlavey regime. It surprised him to find how many such there were in town. He was convinced that all this element needed was ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... addition being made, no new element appears. The vowel, indeed, is changed, but nothing is added. Verbs, then, of the first sort, may be said to form their praeterites out of themselves; whilst verbs of the second sort require something from without. To speak in a metaphor, words like sang and fell are comparatively independent. Be this as it may, the German grammarians call the tenses formed by a change of vowel the strong tenses, the strong verbs, the strong conjugation, or the strong order; and those ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... 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 ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... to say, that in Arabic there is the like metaphor, of the sun's rays to a deer's horns. R. adds, that the Jews also attributed horns to Moses in another sense, figuratively for ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... languages, are necessarily the images of sensations. Men have never been able to express anything but what they felt. Thus everything has become metaphor; everywhere the soul is enlightened, the heart burns, the mind wanders. Among all peoples the infinite has been the negation of the finite; immensity the negation of measure. It is evident that our five senses have produced all languages, as well as all our ideas. The ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... world. But argument in this respect is simply wasted on the ruling caste in South Africa: there, Mr. Cross's views about "freedom, liberty," etc., will simply be laughed out of court, unless he limits them to white men; so that one sometimes wonders whether Christ's metaphor about "casting pearls before swine" does not find an application here. Look at the weighty arguments delivered inside and outside Parliament against the Natives' Land Act. Surely no legislature with a sense of responsibility ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of the law to ourselves by what physical metaphor or analogy we will, however, the great matter is to apprehend its existence and the importance of the consequences deducible from it. For things which are like to the same are like to one another; and if; in a great series of generations, every offspring is like ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... womanliness is regarded in our country as the saintliness of love. It is not merely praised there, but literally worshipped; and she who is gifted with it is called Devi, as one revealing in herself Woman, the Divine. That this has not been a mere metaphor to us is because, in India, our mind is familiar with the idea of God in an eternal feminine aspect. Thus the Eastern woman, who is deeply aware in her heart of the sacredness of her mission, is a constant education to man. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... "do" at a leap, or some such trifle, to which the most scrupulous could not raise an objection, Dick was all fair and above-board. But when poor Sir Piers had "put on his wooden surtout," to use Dick's own expressive metaphor, his conscientious scruples evaporated into thin air. Lady Rookwood was nothing to him; there was excellent ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... standing crops, on the fruitful plough-land, or she should lie beneath the elm that weds the vine, on the very lap of mother earth, among the springing herbage, the trailing vine-shoots and the budding trees. I may add that the metaphor in the line ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... boys of this school. According 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, I trust they will signify ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... 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
... prevent the admission of rain, or sea water, whereby their charges might be rendered incapable of service. A tewel (tuyau, or tuyal, Fr.) is a pipe; and is here used (for the sake of continuing the metaphor) for bore or calibre. Moxon, in his "Mechanick Exercises," defines the tewel to be that pipe in a smith's forge into which the nose of the bellows is introduced; and in a MS. fragment, said to be written by Sir Francis Drake, concerning the stores of one of the ships under his command, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... orator Before, or since, with burning thought, In parable, and metaphor; Each simple illustration taught Some sacred truth, some truth which could By sage, or fool, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... have employed a more effective metaphor in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... 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
... country that I traversed. There is no provision made in this image for the long, transparent screens of thin-twigged trees which rose at intervals out of the watery plain; but as, in all the conditions, there seemed to be no provision for them in fact, I will let my metaphor go for what it is worth. My journey was (as I remember it) of about an hour and a half; but I passed no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The phrase hardly applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town quelconque, as M. Zola would say. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Grattan. The American war tested the rival champions of Liberty. Flood favored sending Irish troops, "armed negotiators" he called them, to deal with the revolted colonists. Grattan nobly reviled him for standing—"with a metaphor in his mouth and a bribe in his pocket, a champion against the rights of America, the only hope of Ireland and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind." Flood collapsed under his ignoble honors. He was not restored by returning to patriotic opposition. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... of metaphor, to the months of purification which, according to the Muslim ceremonial law, must be accomplished by a divorced woman, before she can ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... absolutely infer meditated violence. The favourite parables of the preachers, and the metaphors and ornaments which they selected, were at all times of a military cast; and the taking the kingdom of heaven by storm, a strong and beautiful metaphor, when used generally as in Scripture, was detailed in their sermons in all the technical language of the attack and defence of a fortified place. The danger, in short, whatever might have been its actual ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... mean that the three last are in all respects of the greatest names in English literature. I only mean that, in a certain quality, which for want of a better word I have chosen to call Atlantean, they stand alone. Each of them, for the metaphor is applicable either way, carries a whole world on his shoulders, or looks down on a whole world from his natural altitude. The worlds are different, but they are worlds; and though the attitude of the giants is different also, it agrees in all of them on the points of competence and strength. ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 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 that the people ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... not mean asking; it is a mere outpouring of feeling; and for this view of it he claims the authority of the Christian mystics. It is not to be addressed to the Grand Etre, to collective Humanity; though he occasionally carries metaphor so far as to style this a goddess. The honours to collective Humanity are reserved for the public celebrations. Private adoration is to be addressed to it in the persons of worthy individual representatives, who may be either living or dead, but ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... not discern, in this Place, what an Injury is done to the original Image, by the military Metaphor? Recalling the 'Troops' of a Deluge, 'Drawing off its Forces'; and its 'Marching away, at a Signal,' carry not only a visible Impropriety of Thought, but are infinitely below the Majesty of That God, who is so dreadfully represented thundering his Commands to ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... and loved the more on that account. Certainly, thought I to myself, here is the famous spring; a brook that Wordsworth must have known, and that may have been the centre of memory to him in his description of those early Hawkshead days, with its metaphor of fountain life. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... metaphor is in speech. It is the representation to the eye of an object which suggests ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... the absolute. So that it is not stereotyped, perfectly beautiful women who are wont to kindle great passions. Before a truly passionate feeling can exist, something is necessary that is perhaps best expressed by a metaphor in chemistry—namely, the two persons must neutralise each other, like acid and alkali to a neutral salt. Before this can be done the following conditions are essential. In the first place, all sexuality is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... not," answered the Master of Ravenswood, "challenge the freedom of speech in which I have set example. What, to speak without a metaphor, do you call this monstrous passion which you ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... by so many writers is false. For fury is empty, whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum. Save when he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook, vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... guide, who launches 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... been pointed out (e.g. Notes and Queries, 1855, Series I. xi. 472) that this fine metaphor may be traced to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. The subject is Zerbino, the son of the King ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the voice of Hohab was heard crying out, "Attend to me, attend to me, for I am the well-rubbed Palm-stem." The figure Hobab used represented a palm-trunk left for the beasts to come and rub themselves upon. It was a metaphor for a person much resorted to for counsel. John Talmage never called attention to himself, but the Arab chief must have counseled many, and well, to have taken a higher place than did this messenger ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... whom should I overtake but my landlady in a dress of 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 stairs, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inheritance given in a WILL, &c. I have some doubts whether reason always carries things as far as you would wish to carry this metaphor to make it a parallel. Reason sometimes moves in a small circle; and that too without being unreasonable. If the benefit is said to have been absolutely made, and reason is informed of the fact, it has a right to take it for granted, that the donor had the property to give, and that it is ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... hair 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 into ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... by the Great Lakes, in some years, reaching a total five times as large as the traffic expected through Panama. One can not contemplate this constant interchange of traffic without recalling the metaphor of the warp and the woof, of the shuttle weaving a fabric of international commerce that ignores dead reciprocity pacts and an invisible boundary. Yet England does three-fourths of the carrying trade for the United ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... language of metaphor, Messere," said he, rather stiffly, "to serve your occasions. You are of course within your rights. However, I will beg leave to be excused the red pepper ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... 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 ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... drawing breath, or inspiration, is of the same nature as that by which the handles of a bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows with air; and, in like manner, it involves that expenditure of energy which we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere metaphor to say that man is destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration which began with his first breath ends only with his last; nor does one born in the purple get off with a lighter task than the child who first sees ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansom cab for the first and, I am happy to believe, the last time. Polycrates threw one ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates. I have thrown one hansom cab into the sea (if you will excuse a rather violent metaphor) and the Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated. Though I am told they do not like to be ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... might have been expected from the circumstances of the nation, it appears in point of fact on the whole face of the Scriptures, that as the institutes of the commonwealth were symbolical, the language of the people was figurative. They were at home in metaphor. It was their vernacular. The sudden and bold adoption of physical forms in order to convey spiritual conceptions, did not surprise—did not puzzle them. "Ye are the salt of the earth," "Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together," ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... dealing with a man of imagination. "Like a dragon springing." Springing from what? What did dragons spring from anyway? Eggs, like snakes? Dragons were reptiles werent they? Or werent they? Give up the metaphor? I set my teeth with determination and began again. "Not unlike a fierce and belligerently furious dragon or some other ferocious, blustery and furious chimerical creature, a menacing and comminatory debacle is burning fierily ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... disinterested respect for merit, 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 joint of an antediluvian reptile into a theme ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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
... "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 determined (see ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography." His ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called Saintsburyese—not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor: ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... while you," says he, "are for setting the top on the picqued end and downwards, you won't be able to keep it up any longer than you keep whipping and scourging; whereas I am for setting the broad end downwards, and so 'twill stand of itself." The metaphor has obvious defects, but expresses the broadness of the Broad party ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... saint, and how the camels were to be laid upon the altar?" With greater pungency, Sheridan defended himself by saying, "This is the first time in my life that I ever heard of special pleading on a metaphor, or a bill of indictment against a trope; but such is the turn of the learned gentleman's mind, that when he attempts to be humorous no jest can be found, and when serious no fact is visible."[31] To the last ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of 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, but observed it often in the cabinets of the curious ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... 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 ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... cheapening of printed matter, seem to have dulled that faculty and given us a scattered state of mind. We browse dispersedly, in goatish fashion, instead of nibbling down to the root like that more conscientious quadruped whose name, if I mentioned it, would degrade the metaphor. Devouring so much, so hastily, so irreverentially, how shall a man establish close contact with the mind of him who writes, and impregnate himself with his peculiar outlook to such an extent as to be able to take on, if only ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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 ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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 prolonged after death—is without its value. ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... 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 ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... many times did Ernest Hyde and I Argue about the freedom of the will. My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow Roped out to grass, and free you know as far As the length of the rope. One day while arguing so, watching the cow Pull at the rope to get beyond the circle Which she had eaten bare, Out came the stake, and ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... the 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 message; and it was no less a message ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... however, as all very well know, contains a very great variety of fish, and—to vary the metaphor—to the fisherman was given charge not only of the sheep—foolish enough, heaven knows!—but also of the still more helpless lambs. Thus it becomes the duty and the privilege of the successors of the fisherman to protect the sheep and the lambs, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... soil be made by actual addition; nor that the thorns could never be uprooted and their former habitat be rendered fit to support good plants. The parable is to be studied in the spirit of its purpose; and strained inferences or extensions are unwarranted. A strong metaphor, a striking simile, or any other expressive figure of speech, is of service only when rationally applied; if carried beyond the bounds of reasonable intent, the best of such may become meaningless or ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth) originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was justified. England is an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is concerned, it is the island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us. And this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union with Him. That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. "He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal." His flesh and blood—a common Jewish phrase for human nature—is precisely that common nature ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... 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 but rather aggravating explanation for ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... 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 symmetrically by opening with a prologue-poem sounding the ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... happy islands: every fresh discovery they made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings, offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation; seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a surface so multitudinously ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... childling be granted you, well and good; but, if the captain call, run to the ship and leave such possessions behind you, not looking back. But if you be an old man, take care not to go a long distance from the ship at all, lest you should be called and come too late." The metaphor is a significant one, and perhaps the following lines of Sir Walter Scott, prefixed anonymously to one of the chapters of the Waverley Novels, may help to throw light ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... over the things that might have been if the good Osiris had come up to the scratch—I will still be content, because your friendship, Ruth, is better than another woman's love. So you see, I have taken my gruel and come up to time smiling—if you will pardon the pugilistic metaphor—and I promise you loyally to do your bidding and never ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... would punish a trout in that manner Mr Tupper failed to explain, but his metaphor was always a worse fit than his trousers and ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... originally published in 1658; its author, F. T., was the father of the better known Nahum Tate, the co-translator of the last authorised version of the Psalms,—a Teat which, following the metaphor of Mr. Chishull, has nourished not a few generations of the godly, but now, like a sucked orange, thrown aside for the more juicy productions of our modern Psalmists. Old Teate (or Tate, as the junior would have it) is styled in this book, "preacher ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... George Gorham said 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 deep, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... to comfort her and straining metaphor to the utmost, said that if the finger of Providence had not made her oversleep herself she would undoubtedly ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... wrote 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
... beyond their legitimate application was a source of confusion in the early ages of science. Most of the superstitions of primitive religion, of astrology, and of alchemy, arose from this source. A good example is the extension of the metaphor in the words generation and corruption: words in constant use in scientific works until the nineteenth century began. Generation is the production of a substance that before was not, and corruption is ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... indecency. It is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies by ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the whole time,) what I felt is, in the common phrase, not to be expressed; in a more simple one—perhaps too simple to raise any emotion, my feelings were very, very painful. Every line, every word was—in the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she here, would forbid—a dagger to my heart. To know that Marianne was in town was, in the same language, a thunderbolt. Thunderbolts and daggers! what a reproof would she have given me! her taste, her opinions—I believe they are better known to me than my own, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... spirit of Tone, but to renew their adhesion to the faith of Tone and to express their full acceptance of the gospel of which Tone had given such a clear definition. That gospel had been taught before him by English-speaking men, uttered half-articulately by Shan O'Neill, expressed in some passionate metaphor by Geoffrey Keating, and hinted at by Swift in some bitter jibe, but it was stated definitely and emphatically by Wolfe Tone and it did not need to be ever again stated anew for any new generation. Tone was great ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... artist soul, had some dim feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new quarto of his, in which "a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin'': boldly granting the margin to be of superior importance to the print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in Burton's "Bookhunter'': wherein you read of certain folios with "their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes, sedgy with citations.'' ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... Merchandise had just made the circuit of the world in his behalf. The said dauphin was then young, was handsome, was stout, and, above all (magnificent origin of all royal virtues), he was the son of the Lion of France. I declare that this bold metaphor is admirable, and that the natural history of the theatre, on a day of allegory and royal marriage songs, is not in the least startled by a dolphin who is the son of a lion. It is precisely these ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... of Mr. Hornblower's heavy features indicated that he had grasped Persis' metaphor. He broke out eagerly. "Now, that's just what I was saying to my wife. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... metaphor, as we afterward learned, meant only that she would sail some time in the course of the summer; but we, in our trustful inexperience, supposed that the brig must be all ready to cast off her moorings, and the announcement threw us into all the excitement ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... did not shift hand or foot on the controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me against the shock to have myself braced to the business of driving. You have read in books, I dare say, of hell looking out of a man's eyes, but perhaps you don't know what a good metaphor that is. If I had not known Manderson was there, I should not have recognized the face. It was that of a madman, distorted, hideous in the imbecility of hate, the teeth bared in a simian grin of ferocity and triumph, the eyes—! ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... story can only be understood as an eastern metaphor, expressive of the tyrannous disposition of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... this verse by Davison and the authors whom he quotes, nothing is said of the word [Hebrew: PETACH]. I do not know of any place in Holy Scripture where this word is used figuratively, and unless this can be shown, there is no supporting so strong a metaphor as the advocates of the figurative meaning of the passage contend for. Davison takes no notice of the remainder of the verse.... Now the words are remarkable; they are the same as those in which the Lord declares the subjection of Eve to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... languish? where rich invention, proper expression, correct design, divine attitudes, and artful contrast, heightened with the beauties of clar. obscur., embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the delight and astonishment of the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive eloquence! the quaint metaphor, the poignant irony, the proper epithet, and the lively simile, are fled for ever! Instead of these, we shall have, I know not what! The illiterate will tell the ...
— English Satires • Various
... wrote two years afterward. It is a luxuriant, unpruned work, written in haste for the press within the space of three weeks, but one which gave rich promise of the poet. A chapter in the middle of the book, introducing the scenes of those four years of struggle, is wholly devoted to a remarkable metaphor, which becomes an allegory and a sermon, in which war is pictured as "a strange, enormous, terrible flower," which "the early spring of 1861 brought to bloom besides innumerable violets and jessamines." ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... given, the third of the sixteen extant, is given entire from Neale's translation. It is one of the best examples of the Middle-Age style of interpreting all Scripture as metaphor and parable. It contains, moreover, a number of striking passages, such as, "It is a proof of great ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... wasted his talent in attacking "the Refuse of the Town" centers in the stanza beginning on p. 24 but can be found elsewhere as well. Literary "Refuse," he realized, could not safely be ignored, for he at least came close to understanding that it was "the metaphor by which bigger deteriorations," social and moral, "are ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... intimate, that an English Poet,—one whom the Muse has mark'd for her own, could produce a more luxuriant bloom of flowers, by cultivating such as are natives of the soil, than by endeavouring to force the exotics of another climate: or, to speak without a metaphor, such a genius as Mr. Gray might give greater pleasure, and acquire a larger portion of fame, if, instead of being an imitator, he did justice to his talents, and ventured to be more an original. These two Odes, it must be confessed, breath[e] much of the spirit of Pindar, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... wealth of dramatic situations most concisely defined. In this, the Sclavonic folktale differs radically from its Celtic neighbour. A comparison of the two types suggests that the Russian principally desires a clear statement of facts; a poetic idea which must be extracted from clouds of metaphor conveys but little significance to his mind. An innate love of song, an innate love of acting, a keen perception of dramatic unity, combined with a passionate love of colour and a strong sense of movement—here surely, without any manner of doubt, one has the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... method is not alien to that of "Madame Bovary," but he knew how to give it a suppleness, a variety, and a freedom which were always wanting in Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is always strained. To use the expressive metaphor of the Greek athletes, he "smells of the oil." When one recalls that when attacked by hysteric epilepsy, Flaubert postponed the crisis of the terrible malady by means of sedatives, this strained atmosphere of labor—I was going ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... "Mistaken metaphor," rejoined his friend. "I'm a well-bred nonentity. You're a diamond in the rough. When once you've been ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... 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 ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... is reported to have said that his tragedies were "slices from the great banquet of Homer." The metaphor is not a very pleasing one, but it expresses a truth. By Homer, AEschylus meant not only our Iliad and Odyssey, but the whole body of Epic or Heroic poetry which centred round not only the Siege of Troy but the great expedition of ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... she is stifled by the humdrum life at Norton with her aunts, how she leaves them to wring from life a measure of individual freedom and happiness, and how she finds both, only to end once more where she began. To use a metaphor from music, her life is a piece marked "Da capo." BLINDFOLDED is by far the best novel Miss Rogers has yet written, a book ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... 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 of his illustrious master. For twenty years he was the most accomplished ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... arts, and literature of a people naturally impart to their annals a spirit all their own. Especially is this the case in the Orient, where the most original and suggestive thought is half disguised in the garb of metaphor, and where, in spite of vivid fancies and fiery passions, the people affect taciturnity or reticence, and delight in the metaphysical and the mystic. Hence the early annals of the Siamese, or Sajamese, abound in fables of heroes, demigods, giants, and genii, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... own home he was especially happy, and it was a great privilege to share his table-talk and hospitality, for he had a great fund of kindly humor and his speech was bright with homely metaphor and apt allusions. Not only was he a great preacher, he was a leader, an inspirer, and a ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock |
