Metaphors are used to compare one thing to another thing. Many different mediums use metaphors, including some that don’t seem like they should mix: like sports, art, and literature.
Sports Metaphors
- Sport is war minus the shooting. – George Orwell
- Of all golf’s hazards, fear is the worst. – Sam Snead
- I’m not saying my golf game is bad, but if I grew tomatoes, they’d come up sliced. – Lee Trevino
- To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and gut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. – J. B. Priestley
- So I think while our competitors are trying to catch up with their first generation to where we were, we’re off shifting the goal post down the field even farther every time. – Paul Jacobs
- And again, we think there’s more opportunity on the commercial real estate side, and we’re going to play kind of in our sweet spot in how we do business, which we’re going to hit a lot more singles and doubles than kind of looking at the distress pieces, if you will. – Nelson Chai
- While not everything can be a Monster High, we’re confident that hitting singles and doubles without new franchises will drive strong returns. – Kevin Farr
- So we’re now challenging them to figure out a way to get to 3%. It’s a game of inches right now. – George Gleason
- I think the management team is fully aware of these issues, and we keep knocking them out of the park to the extent that we can. – Sergio Marchionne
Metaphors About Art
- Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures. – Henry Ward Beecher
- Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life. – Pablo Picasso
- Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body. – Oliver Wendell Holmes
- The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance. – Ansel Adams
- Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb. – Jean Arp
- Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. – Auden
- A work of art should be like a well-planned crime. – Charles Baudelaire
- Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. – Edmund Burke
- If I were called on to define briefly the word ‘art,’ I should call it the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul. – Paul Cézanne
- Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood. – Jean Cocteau
- Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it. – Robertson Davies
- Painting is the trade that takes the longest to learn and is the most difficult. It demands erudition like that of the composer, but it also demands execution like that of the violinist. – Eugène Delacroix
- All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. – Federico Fellini
- Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul. – Wassily Kandinsky
- Every time I paint, I throw myself into the water in order to learn how to swim. – Édouard Manet
Metaphors in Literature
- hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune–without the words, / And never stops at all – Emily Dickinson
- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost
- How now! a conduit, girl? what, still in tears? / Evermore showering? In one little body / Thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind; / For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea, / Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is, / Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs; / Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them, / Without a sudden calm, will overset. – William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet
- Marriage is not a house or even a tent. – Margaret Atwood
- This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. … The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. – F. Scott Fitgerald
