What They Say

There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
George Orwell

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.
Paul de Man

There is no non-metaphorical standpoint from which one could look upon metaphor, and all the other figures for that matter, as if they were a game played before one’s eyes. In many respects, the continuation of this study will be a prolonged battle with this paradox
Paul Ricoeur

The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will. Sol Luckman

Part of being a rational animal involves getting what you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict. As a result, we humans have evolved the social institution of verbal argument.
George Lakoff

The greatest thing is style. . . a mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
Aristotle

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately
Gaston Bachelard

All those Theories in Philosophy which are expressed only in metaphorical Terms are not real Truths, but the mere products of Imagination, dress'd up (like children) in a few spangled empty words .... Thus their wanton and luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes.
Samuel Parker in 1666.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman