Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.
Quotes about metaphorical (16 Quotes)
The Ganges front is the supreme showplace of Benares. Its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair flights, rich and stately palaces....soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed - streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in metaphorical gardens on the mile of great platforms at the river's edge.
Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
Like I said earlier, the movie is metaphorical for the world. Today we're seeing so many instances of monumental duplicity, ... I think that's the task, in a way, to show what an architect of duplicity this character is, in his simplicity, forthrightness and morality. It's a strange and wonderful study of how far a horrible lie can be taken in terms of a character.
At the celebration at the Shiite shrine, a cleric gave a scathing speech in the mosque's courtyard. He lashed out at the first Muslim caliphs, the founding fathers of Islam in Sunni eyes, and usurpers of power in Shiite eyes. Though he couched his attacks in the context and vocabulary of early Islamic history, it was clear that he had much more contemporary targets in his metaphorical crosshairs.
The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that.
I don't believe that anymore but you certainly know that world. But I wasn't Catholic. It was slightly different. The metaphorical strength of that stuff, of those stories, whether it's stories from the Bible or stories from contemporary mythology like The Exorcist have enormous metaphorical weight.
Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problem arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors. Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.
I'd like to write what life could be like, instead of what it is like. I guess I haven't figured out enough on how to live to the best of my abilities to be able to be metaphorical or use similes about this apparent reality called life around me.
Koans are the folk stories of Zen Buddhism, metaphorical narratives that particularize essential nature.
In recent decades this symbolic or metaphorical lyric has given way to one which leans toward metonymy.
But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.
I think that there is a lot of metaphorical truth in the books, and I think that particularly when she talks about things like the protection of love, ... I think the reading experience is more rich and complex than just a bunch of fun, funky magical effects.
John was a storyteller, ... He wasn't very metaphorical, he wasn't really abstract.
I want to know, for example, why beauty exists, she said, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough.