A Quote by Neil Postman

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

Neil Postman

Quote Topics

Another Metaphor Metaphors One Thing Organ Ornament Perception See Thing Through World

Quote Author

Neil Postman
American - Author
March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003

Look who's calling the cauldron black." "Kettle. It’s a kettle. Get your metaphors right." "That wasn’t a metaphor. It was a, you know..." He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that’s symbolic of another thing. But isn’t the same thing. Just like it." "You mean a metaphor?" "No! It’s like a story...like...a proverb! That’s it." "I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy." "I don’t think so.

Richelle Mead

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

Ray Bradbury

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

Aristotle

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.

Aristotle

The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and "seeing" supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.

Zygmunt Bauman

... I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

Max Black

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

Ted Dekker

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Milan Kundera

A lot of places we go, when they see the organ coming in, they're expecting rock and roll, but after they hear us play they like it. To me, guitar cuts through-it carries more than organ. But organ has got more guts.

Wes Montgomery

'District 9' was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and 'Elysium' is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.

Neill Blomkamp

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Robert Frost

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

C. S. Lewis

Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.

Marie Rutkoski

The way we see the world is not actually the world in itself. What we see is our idea of it. The truth is, we have no notion of what the world is other than through the veils of our perception.