Analogy Quotes

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“A good speech should be like a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.”
― Joseph Addison

“As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
― Albert Einstein

“Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men's hands, since the publication of Newton's ‘Principia’, is Darwin's ‘Origin of Species.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”
― Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

“I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather.

Here are some obvious things about the weather:

It's real.
You can't change it by wishing it away.
If it's dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can't alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.

BUT
it will be sunny one day.
It isn't under one's control when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.

It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are all are real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE'S CONTROL.
Not one's fault.

BUT
They will pass: really they will.

In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, "Today is a really crap day," is a perfectly realistic approach. It's all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. "Hey-ho, it's raining inside; it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage.”
― Stephen Fry

“To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click 'I agree'.”
― Bill Maher

“Without inspiration, we’re all like a box of matches that will never be lit.”
― David Archuleta, Chords of Strength: A Memoir of Soul, Song and the Power of Perseverance

“If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.”
― Richard Nixon

“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“There is one absolute truth. The sum of my existence equals you.”
― Kristen Callihan, The Friend Zone

“Don't you agree? Swordplay is a dance of sorts, an understanding of the logical, most sophisticated next step. Except that in a fight, one must take the unexpected step. In dance it is all about taking the right, expected step.”
― Lisa Tawn Bergren, Waterfall

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”
― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

“Le savant doit ordonner ; on fait la science avec des faits comme une maison avec des pierres ; mais une accumulation de faits n'est pas plus une science qu'un tas de pierres n'est une maison.

The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
― Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis

“He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that left me blinking two days later.”
― Dean Koontz, Seize the Night

“We got half the doggone MIT college of engineering here, and nobody who can fix a doggone /television/?" Dr. Joseph Abernathy glared accusingly at the clusters of young people scattered around his living room.

That's /electrical/ engineering, Pop," his son told him loftily. "We're all mechanical engineers. Ask a mechanical engineer to fix your color TV, that's like asking an Ob-Gyn to look at the sore on your di-ow!"

Oh, sorry," said his father, peering blandly over gold-rimmed glasses. "That your foot, Lenny?”
― Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

“And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True

“Studying wine taught me that there was a very big difference between soil and dirt: dirt is to soul what zombies are to humans. Soil is full of life, while dirt is devoid of it.”
― Olivier Magny, Into Wine: An Invitation to Pleasure

“Seeing is the property of our eyes. But we also use this word in other senses, when we apply the power of vision to knowledge generally. We do not say 'Hear how that flashes', or 'Smell how bright that is', or 'Taste how that shines' or 'Touch how that gleams'. Of all these things we say 'see'. But we say not only 'See how that light shines', which only the eyes can perceive, but also 'See how that sounds, see what smells, see what tastes, see how hard that is'. So the general experience of the senses is the lust, as scripture says, of the eyes, because seeing is a function in which eyes hold the first place but other senses claim the word for themselves by analogy when they are exploring any department of knowledge.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions