66 Metaphor Quotes To Inspire

Metaphors have long been a compelling tool in literature and speech, painting vivid images with words and adding depth to mundane concepts. They hold the power to inspire, motivate, and provoke thought, offering fresh perspectives on everyday experiences. In this collection, we delve into 66 metaphor quotes that capture the essence of inspiration, drawn from an array of authors, philosophers, and visionaries. Whether you seek a moment of reflection or a spark of creativity, these metaphorical insights will illuminate your path. Join us as we explore these evocative and inspiring expressions that transcend the ordinary.

1. “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” - Matt Groening

2. “Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.” - Steve Grand

3. “Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.” - Thomas Fuller

4. “...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

5. “It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.” - Malcolm X

6. “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

7. “For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion... even God.""It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor.""Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.” - Pam Houston

8. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” - Truman Capote

9. “Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

10. “If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.” - Dorothy Gambrell

11. “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” - Freidrich Neitzsche

12. “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.” - Vladimir Nabokov

13. “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.” - Joseph Campbell

14. “What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.” - Robert Hughes

15. “The well-being of a neuron depends on its ability to communicate with other neurons. Studies have shown that electrical and chemical stimulation from both a neuron's inputs and its targets support vital cellular processes. Neurons unable to connect effectively with other neurons atrophy. Useless, an abandoned neuron will die. ” - Lisa Genova

16. “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

17. “Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.” - Veronica Hollinger

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

19. “The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.” - Jeanette Winterson

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

21. “... we [can] catch fish and just throw them back... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then... one [may] swallow the hook...[it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I've swallowed it big time. ” - Graham McNamee

22. “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

23. “Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.” - Thomas S. Monson

24. “Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?” - Alex Flinn

25. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue” - Anne Lamott

26. “She's all over us like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with one pickpocket yesterday.” - Tamora Pierce

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

28. “Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.” - Sarah Blake

29. “My master gives me bread and beer and every good thing.” - Garret Keizer

30. “The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.” - Northrop Frye

31. “Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal the mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.” - William Shakespeare

32. “Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.” - Richard Kadrey

33. “She remembered how it had felt and tasted, that slowly descending depression, like a thick glass jar that closed around you, sucking away the air you needed to breathe, creating a barrier between you and the world. The hell of it was that she'd been able to see all that she was missing, but when she'd reached out, all she'd touched was cold, hard glass.” - Kristin Hannah

34. “...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.” - Robin Sloan

35. “The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.” - Criss Jami

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

37. “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

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

39. “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

40. “If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.” - Vera Nazarian

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

42. “They're holding flushes of face cards, and I think we're the pot.” - Howard Tayler

43. “As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.” - Antisthenes Pinto

44. “Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.” - Annie Dillard

45. “It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow--such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father's fist.” - Elissa Janine Hoole

46. “Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?” - J.R.R. Tolkien

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

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

49. “He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.” - Laini Taylor

50. “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

51. “...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.” - Ned Beauman

52. “It's a mind, it works by metaphor.” - Simon J. Townley

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

54. “The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way” - Carl Henegan

55. “Delia was an overbearing cake with condescending frosting, and frankly, I was on a diet.” - Maggie Stiefvater

56. “Where death follows, there’s life. When darkness surrounds you in a world of chaos, search and you’ll eventually find the light.” - Lee Argus

57. “The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.” - Kurt Vonnegut

58. “I feel all agitated, like one of those snow globes you see resting peacefully on shop counters. I was perfectly happy being an ordinary, dull little Swiss village. But now Jack Harper’s come and shaken me up, and there are snowflakes all over the place, whirling around until I don’t know what I think anymore. And bits of glitter, too. Tiny bits of shiny, secret excitement.” - Sophie Kinsella

59. “Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her FaceEnchants all those whom once She doth embrace,Nor is ther any can Her bewty prizeBut he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:Those following Leaves display, if well observed,How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.” - James Howell

60. “Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.” - John Green

61. “One more piece of sky in the jigsaw puzzle of our school.” - Em Bailey

62. “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

63. “After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.” - Willa Cather

64. “Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other.” - Gen Urobuchi

65. “I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.” - Salman Rushdie

66. “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