James Geary Quotes

The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to "a kind of teeming...like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance." That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry.

If our bodies were different, though, our metaphors would be different, as Olaf Stapledon showed in Star Maker. Crabs walk sideways, for instance. If crabs could talk, they would undoubtedly describe progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express the hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them.

Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.

In the West, people typically gesture in front of themselves when talking about the future. In one study, participants contemplating the future even tended to lean forward, while those recalling the past tended to lean backward. It seems that we're not in a position to decline our inclination to regard the future as something in front of us.

In South America, however, speakers of Aymara gesture behind themselves when talking about the future. Why? In Aymaran culture, the past is ahead because it is already known and can therefore be seen. The future, in contrast, is unknown and can't be seen; therefore, it is located behind the speaker. Aymaran and Western embodied concepts of the past and future are contradictory, yet they are based on identical bodily metaphors.

Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.

To convey the operation of electromagnetic fields, Feynman used the master metaphor of two corks floating in a pool of water. If you move one cork around in the water, you immediately notice that the other one moves, too. Looking only at the two corks, Feynman explained, a naive physicist might be forgiven for thinking there was some kind of interaction between the corks that caused one to move in response to the other.

The second cork, however, is not moved directly by the first cork but by the movement of the water. "If we jiggle the cork...waves travel away," Feynman explained, "so that by jiggling, there is an influence very much farther out, an oscillatory influence. That cannot be understood by the direct interaction. Therefore the idea of direct interaction must be replaced with the existence of the water, or in the electrical case, with what we call the electromagnetic field.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery,

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

Sometimes, you need a door slammed in your face before you can hear opportunity knock.

Why must an aphorism be brief?
Because only a fool gives a speech in a burning house.

You only really discover the strength of your spine when your back is against the wall.

Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.

Heroism often results as a response to extreme events.

The word "kenning" comes from the Old Norse verb kenna, which is also a "seeing=knowing" metaphor, meaning "to know, recognize, or perceive." The etymology survives in words meaning "to know" in various Scandinavian languages as well as in German and Dutch. Kenna is also the source of the English "can" as well as the somewhat arcane "ken," as found in the expression "beyond my ken," meaning "beyond my knowledge.

For life is short and the art of writing books is very, very long.

Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word "fathom." for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means "to understand." Why?

Scrabble around in the word's etymological roots. "Fathom comes from the Anglo-Saxon faethm, meaning "the two arms outstretched." The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outsretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean "to understand," as in "I can't fathom that" or "She's unfathomable"? Metaphorically, of course.

You master something- you learn to control or accept it-when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it-fathom it.

Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot

Why do statisticians never have friends?

Because they're mean people.

What color is the wind?

Blew.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.

Aphorisms are food for thought - like sushi, they come in small portions that are both delicious and exquisitely formed. And, like sushi, I can never get enough.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

Comparing your beloved to a red, red rose might be fine if you're writing a poem, but these thinkers believed more exact language was needed to express the "truth"-a term, by the way, distilled from Icelandic, Swedish, Anglo-Saxon, and other non-English words meaning "believed" rather than certain.

I believe aphorisms are best when first read in the wild, free from the confines of any categories.