The title of this post is a quote from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. I am the happy owner of the book,
Metaphors Be With You: An A to Z Dictionary of History’s Greatest Metaphorical Quotations
This gift to myself, written by Dr. Mardy Grothe has enriched my life. That’s probably why I find myself constantly rereading it.
Dr. Grothe reminds us,
Metaphor isn’t just for poets; it’s in ordinary language and is the principal way we have of conceptualizing abstract concepts like life, death, and time.
Dr. Grothe shares the following definition of metaphor from the American Heritage Dictionary,
A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage.”
Sometimes words can be spartan, meaningless collections of letters, if you ever read some really bad writing, you’ll know what I mean.
That’s why I love reading these metaphors, like this one from German writer Berthold Auerbach:
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
One of my favorites is from Napoleon:
A leader is a dealer in hope.
French-American diarist and essayist, Anais Nin, speaks volumes in nine words about courage:
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Psychologist Terri Apter captures the essence of youth:
Adolescence is society’s permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility
Benjamin Disraeli catches the positive side of misfortune:
There is no education like adversity
Robert Louis Stevenson communicates what it is like to age in a way that this 65 year old can clearly understand:
And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.
Given these last three metaphors were for subjects beginning with the letter “A”. Just imagine how enjoyable the next 25 letters will be.
