“Our world isn’t made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language..” —Tom Robbins

The rising and setting of the sun: a metaphor of a day on a spinning ball of words in a universe of verse.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

—Octavio Paz

Like black holes in a cosmos or a bowling ball, metaphors are figurative handles by which to grasp the spinning ball of words. Should it fall, a catch phrase from the universe of verse could save it.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

—Joseph Campbell

Without metaphors—by which to turn over a new leaf, march to a different drummer, take the path less traveled by, think outside the box, fly by the seat of one’s pants and spin a yarn from the big bang to kingdom come—would it be literally true of one who says, ‘I think, therefore, I am.’?

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

The voice of vision. The idiom of imagination. The lingua franca of art. Whatever it’s called, those who use the tongue of the mind—as the Roman poet Horace called the pen—will note: metaphors are, on a ball of words in a universe of verse, all she wrote.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

—José Ortega y Gasset