52 Metaphor Quotes To Inspire

Metaphors have a unique way of tapping into our emotions and sparking our imagination. They connect the abstract with the concrete, turning complex ideas into relatable, vivid images. Whether you’re seeking daily inspiration, looking to gain new perspectives, or simply in need of some poetic language to brighten your day, these metaphor quotes are sure to resonate. Join us as we explore a handpicked selection of 52 metaphor quotes that promise to ignite your creativity and inspire deeper thought. Dive in and let the power of metaphor transform the way you see the world.

1. “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men's hands, since the publication of Newton's ‘Principia’, is Darwin's ‘Origin of Species.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

2. “If funkytown was a trailerpark, this guy would be a double-wide.” - Maya Angelou

3. “...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.” - Antonio Damasio

4. “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” - Joseph Campbell

5. “At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.” - William Arrowsmith

6. “METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.” - Chris Ware

7. “Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. ” - Henry David Thoreau

8. “Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?” - Richard Powers

9. “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag

10. “The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor.I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.” - Mark Haddon

11. “And metaphors like cats behind your smile,Each one wound up to purr,each one a pride,Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)” - Ray Bradbury

12. “Living a good life is like flipping pancakes. If you hesitate, it splatters all over the place.” - Matt Simpson

13. “I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.” - David Levithan

14. “Life is like a B-picture script.” - Kirk Douglas

15. “Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. -Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)” - Ani DiFranco

16. “putriku menaiki lidah petir.membangunkan setiap raksasa malas.mengejarnya hingga sudutsudut kebun hidup.menggambar pertentangan dan kehancuran.” - Dorothea Rosa Herliany

17. “Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain” - Zora Neale Hurston

18. “And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?” - Mervyn Peake

19. “They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Æolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.” - Stendhal

20. “Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.” - E.M. Forster

21. “They say the eyes are the window to the soul.” - Wendy Mass

22. “I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.” - Haruki Murakami

23. “For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.” - George Eliot

24. “But my brain winds and wends. Back and forth. Up and down. It feels like the county fair has inhabited my mind-- complete with sketchy rides, carnies, and sugar-amped kids crying over lost balloons. So loud and disorienting. I want it to pack up and move on to the next town. I want my mind to be an open grassy field again with crickets and dandelions.” - Laura Munson

25. “You're a marshmallow. Soft and sweet and when you get heated up you go all gooey and delicious."-” - Janet Evanovich

26. “She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.” - Mae West

27. “The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.” - Virginia Woolf

28. “I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.” - Isaac Marion

29. “The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.” - M. Thomas Gammarino

30. “Alarm stole over me on little kitten feet.” - Faith Hunter

31. “It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.” - Shannon Hale

32. “Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.” - Jennifer Donnelly

33. “Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.” - Richard Condon

34. “The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...” - Lauren Oliver

35. “Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.” - Margaret Atwood

36. “The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.” - Terry Pratchett

37. “The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.” - Pierre Bourdieu

38. “If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.” - Ice-T

39. “Where glowing embers through the roomTeach light to counterfeit a gloom...” - John Milton

40. “The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.” - Graham Joyce

41. “What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?""No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.""I see. And these are the clowns?"Foaly's head poked through the doorway."Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?” - Eoin Colfer

42. “Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.” - Robert McKee

43. “Together a brick and a blanket create the perfect metaphor for life. Will you be a brick and make something of your life, or be a blanket and sleep your life away?” - Amy Riekhof

44. “His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway” - Jerry Spinelli

45. “My mother always says that love is like a snakebite, a venom slowly spreading through your veins.” - Cynthia Hand

46. “...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn...” - Anne Rivers Siddons

47. “How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.” - Amitav Ghosh

48. “Did you ever get the feeling that everything was too perfect? Like the moment was so good that something had to be wrong? Kind of like the way a fish sees that bright, shiny lure just before it chomps down and gets hauled out of water to become someone's lunch.” - Neal Shusterman

49. “We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue.” - Chuck Palahniuk

50. “At last he was to feel that he had the town, as it were, in his pocket, and was ready for anything. Accordingly he sent a confidential messenger to Rome, to ask his father what step he should next take, his power in Gabii being, by God's grace, by this time absolute. Tarquin, I suppose, was not sure of the messenger's good faith: in any case, he said not a word in reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air went out to the garden. The man followed him, and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence, began knocking off poppy-heads with his stick. The messenger at last wearied of putting his question and waiting for the reply, so he returned to Gabii supposing his mission to have failed. He told Sextus what he had said and what he had seen his father do: the king, he declared, whether from anger, or hatred, or natural arrogance, had not uttered a single word. Sextus realized that though his father had not spoken, he had, by his action, indirectly expressed his meaning clearly enough; so he proceeded at once to act upon his murderous instructions.” - Livy

51. “Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.” - Aimee Bender

52. “I was convinced that she was about to tell me my card was declined, and assumed Derek wanting to talk later meant he'd soon be telling me our life was declined. Everything, everyone had reached their limits with me.” - Joshua Mohr