Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing.
China Mieville • Embassytown: A Novel
His favorite occupation consisted in embellishing his rhetoric with all the proprieties of gesticulation and utterance.
Charles Brockden Brown • Wieland: or, the Transformation, an American Tale
Conceptual metaphorical—
Julie Dirksen • Design for How People Learn (Voices That Matter)
The oracular is not a rational communication but comes often as a metaphor, needing to be moved delicately from one plane of existence onto another, without losing the thread of meaning.
Vicki Noble • Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World
metaphor
Mary Martin • 1 card
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace.
Oscar Wilde • The Picture of Dorian Gray
It sounds like the action it denotes, and in this way slurp signifies in the same way images do: by its likeness to the signified.
Natalie Carnes • Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Encountering Traditions)
Matthew 7:5 and the hypocrite:
He is a hypocrite because his unkind criticism takes the outward form of a kindly act.
Everything that is spoken and can be spoken is merely a figurative term we use to nominate the unnamable, an inventory of “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.