Analogies Quotes

The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian. For my part I do not call myself a "Christian" (thus keeping the ideal free), but I am able to make it evident that the others are still less than I. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. ~ Susan Sontag

Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies. ~ Stefan Banach

He acted like a libertine of Europe with a genteel Southern propriety - and had all the morals of an emotionless psychopath. The two former masked the latter, like leaves covering a snare. You didn't notice the steel jaws until they were impaled in your flesh, and by then it was already far too late to run. ~ Nenia Campbell

In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. ~ Walter Bagehot

Neo-Spenglerians who are attuned to the racial view of history (call them "racists" for convenience) hold that the "final" phase of a Culture - the imperialistic stage - is final only because the cultural organism destroys its body and kills its soul by this process. Obviously, if we are to draw analogies between cultures and organisms we must agree that the soul of the organism dies only because of the death of the body. The soul can sicken - the soul of the West is now diseased and perhaps mortally ill - but it cannot die unless the organism itself dies. And this, point out the racists, is precisely what has happened to all previous cultures; death of the organism being the natural result of the suicidal process of imperialism. ~ Willis Carto

Got anything we can cull the herd with?"
Nick stared at Zane for a few seconds. "I never realized how disturbing your accent is until you use cow analogies."
"Yeah okay, say 'car'. ~ Abigail Roux

People sometimes say, "Isn't it boring, isn't it always the same? It's the same lines." I go, "Well, do you play tennis? Because that's the best analogy I can give." If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah it's the same rules but it's a different game every time you're out on that court.And that's the best analogy I can come up with the theater. ~ Kevin Spacey

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit. ~ Wendell Berry

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises. ~ Brian Eno

If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written. ~ Julio Cortazar

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction. ~ Humphrey Carpenter

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Language is nothing but a huge set of false analogies ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Sam Harris made that great analogy. He said, 'If someone was talking into their hair dryer and claiming that they were speaking to God, they would call Bellevue. But, take away the hair dryer, it's just praying.' ~ Bill Maher

The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game. ~ Jonathan Raymond

One of the main functions of an analogy or model is to suggest extensions of the theory by considering extensions of the analogy, since more is known about the analogy than is known about the subject matter of the theory itself ... A collection of observable concepts in a purely formal hypothesis suggesting no analogy with anything would consequently not suggest either any directions for its own development. ~ Mary Hesse

So Wolf, what did you do?" – Sundown
"You mean before or after I soiled my jeans? Which, by the way, I want kudos for coming back in the cab when I could have gone home. The foot valve was stuck. It doesn't happen often. But it can happen as you just saw. If you're lucky you can pop it back out from the cab. Obviously, given the horrors of this night, I wasn't lucky so I had to crawl under the damn thing at ninety miles an hour and pound it out from underneath. I don't ever want to hang like that under a speeding vehicle again. I swear I just lost eight of my nine lives." – Sasha
"What is it with you the cat analogies?" – Sundown ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

A good analogy is stretching a rubber band. You can stretch and stretch and even feel the tension increase in the muscles in your hands and arms as the gap from one end of the band to the other widens. But at some point you reach the limits of elasticity of the band and it snaps. The same thing happens with human systems. ~ John L. Casti

As long as we're comparing analogies," Jack added, "how about this one? A person being chased by a bear doesn't have to be able to run faster than the bear. He only has to be faster than his slowest companion. Driver picks. I'm going to catch up with the convoy, find a way to pass several of the cars, and not be last in line. ~ Donald G. Firesmith

Proof by analogy is fraud. ~ Bjarne Stroustrup

And we're just chatting and then I'm in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk he reaches down and he honks my boob. HONK. A much-too-firm, two- to three-second HONK. And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can't wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel. ~ John Green

We aren't designed by God to seek the image of others; we are designed to seek him. When we spend time on social media focusing on how well others present their lives, we are, to use one of my father's baseball analogies, taking our eye off the ball. ~ Craig Groeschel

The human mind delights in finding pattern - so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind. ~ Herman Melville

I consider myself as a character actor. I like the sports analogy, which I do all the time; I'm an avid sports guy. I'm a golfer, but I grew up as sort of an avid fan and participant in baseball, and I'm like a relief pitcher. My job is to come in and throw strikes. ~ Clint Howard

If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing. ~ Henri Poincare

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate. ~ Michael Mandelbaum

Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them. ~ Joseph Fourier

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played. ~ Alan Watts

No, not really. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just a part. You just go into it, and like your life, you're walking along the street, as a really bad analogy, you step on a little stone, and it just kind of flies away and you have no idea where it's going. And then you are just trying not to drown afterwards. And that's my life. See, that was really terrible. ~ Robert Pattinson

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time. ~ Thomas Nagel

In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply. ~ Nicholas Carr

Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table. ~ Jeanette Winterson

And - holy shit was this song bad. It was like the singer was stabbing my ear with a dagger made of dried turds. ~ David Wong

In addition, unlike Othello, whose profession of arms is socially honorable, Shylock is a professional usurer who, like a prostitute, has a social function but is an outcast from the community. But, in the play, he acts unprofessionally; he refuses to charge Antonio interest and insists upon making their legal relation that of debtor and creditor, a relation acknowledged as legal by all societies. Several critics have pointed to analogies between the trial scene and the medieval Processus Belial in which Our Lady defends man against the prosecuting Devil who claims the legal right to man's soul. […] But the differences between Shylock and Belial are as important as their similarities. The comic Devil of the mystery play can appeal to logic, to the letter of the law, but he cannot appeal to the heart or to the imagination, and Shakespeare allows Shylock to do both. In his "Hath not a Jew eyes…" speech in Act III, Scene I, he is permitted to appeal to the sense of human brotherhood, and in the trial scene, he is allowed to argue, with a sly appeal to the fear a merchant class has of radical social evolution:

You have among you many a purchased slave
Which like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,

which points out that those who preach mercy and brotherhood as universal obligations limit them in practice and are prepared to treat certain classes of human beings as things. ~ W.H. Auden

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters. ~ T. E. Hulme

The brain is an organ that builds models and makes creative predictions, but its models and predictions can as easily be specious as valid. Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones. Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy. ~ Jeff Hawkins

Fairy tales and mythology have always been an exaggerated distillation of the real world. Think of them as blueprints for how to deal with a multitude of situations that can arise in a person's life. The beauty of them is that their analogies resonate so deeply and they also entertain while they teach. ~ Charles De Lint

The separation of Science from Knowledge was effected step by step as the Subjective Method was replaced by the Objective Method: i.e., when in each inquiry the phenomena of external nature ceased to be interpreted on premisses suggested by the analogies of human nature. ~ George Henry Lewes

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another. ~ Anna Brownell Jameson

The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course. ~ John Shearman

Now, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness' - then you should enter & remain in them.

[Kalama Sutta, AN 3.65] ~ Gautama Buddha

His lessons were chock-full of analogies for a variety of musical situations. Those little things were my favorites. 'No ... that's too much vibrato. It's like putting bright red lipstick on a beautiful woman.' I always thought it was funny that when you broke a musical rule-like accenting a weak beat-he would turn his head away from you sharply, almost as though he were in pain. It's like you just slapped him in the face by being unmusical. ~ Manny Laureano

Any time you make an analogy to horrific people in history, Mussolini or Hitler, people say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating, you're talking about, it's hyperbole.' Maybe it is ... But I would say is that if you are not concerned that democracy could produce bad people, I don't think you're really thinking this through too much. ~ Rand Paul

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies. ~ Charles Baudelaire

However, one can also cognize the existence of the thing prior to the perception of it, and therefore cognize it comparatively a priori, if only it is connected with some perceptions in accordance with the principles of their empirical connection (the analogies). For in that case the existence of the thing is still connected with our perceptions in a possible experience, and with the guidance of the analogies we can get from our actual perceptions to the thing in the series of possible perceptions. Thus we cognize the existence of a magnetic matter penetrating all bodies from the perception of attracted iron filings, although an immediate perception of this matter is impossible for us given the construction of our organs. For in accordance with the laws of sensibility and the context of our perceptions we could also happen upon the immediate empirical intuition of it in an experience of if our senses, the crudeness of which does not affect the form of possible experience in general, were finer. Thus wherever perception and whatever is appended to it in accordance with empirical laws reaches, there too reaches our cognition of the existence of things. If we do not being with experience, or proceed in accordance with laws of the empirical connection of appearances, then we are only making a vain display of wanting to discover or research the existence of any thing. ~ Immanuel Kant

Over time, researchers who look at the adolescent brain have therefore alighted on a variety of metaphors and analogies to describe their excesses. Casey prefers Star Trek: "Teenagers are more Kirk than Spock." Steinberg likens teenagers to cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes. "And then parents are going to get into tussles with their teenagers," says Steinberg, "because they're going to try to be the brakes. ~ Jennifer Senior

Who doesn't enjoy a little gardening? As we plant the seeds and remove the weeds we reap a wonderful harvest of blessings. What are the weeds? Anyone or anything that sucks the nutrients from the seeds we have planted. The seeds are our goals, desires, good thoughts and feelings. good works and deeds anything that uplifts us. If we don't keep up on our weeding then our garden will die. ~ Lindsey Rietzsch

The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science. ~ Freeman Dyson

The ship itself was about as long as a football field, or some other really long thing, given that may honestly could never remember how long football fields were. A hundred yards? That was like three hundred feet, wasn't it? The boat did seem long, but she was over five feet tall herself, and that's be like sixty of her end to end. Only sixty? Or was that a lot of herselves? Stupid analogies. The boat was big, that should cover it. ~ James Riley

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces ~ Sigmund Freud

Let's see... we'll put it in baseball analogies for you since you seem to be so keen on them. Almost third base in a public hallway. Twice. Second base on a blanket at a beach. Homerun, pressed against the window of my bedroom... that overlooks a public beach. ~ K.Bromberg

I am quite wedded to the view that epistemologists should concern themselves with knowledge rather than our concept of knowledge. The analogy I like to draw here is with our understanding of (other) natural kinds. ~ Hilary Kornblith

I think the best analogy for where we are right now is that America is Elvis Presley
the most beautiful, talented, rebellious nation in the history of Earth. And now, you're in your Vegas years. You've squeezed yourself into a white jumpsuit, you're wheezing your way through 'Love Me Tender' and you might be about to pass away bloated on the toilet. But you're still the King. ~ John Oliver

Look who's calling the cauldron black."
"Kettle. It's a kettle. Get your metaphors right."
"That wasn't a metaphor. It was a, you know ... " He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that's symbolic of another thing. But isn't the same thing. Just like it."
"You mean a metaphor?"
"No! It's like a story ... like ... a proverb! That's it."
"I'm pretty sure that wasn't a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy."
"I don't think so. ~ Richelle Mead

Catastrophe Theory is-quite likely-the first coherent attempt (since Aristotelian logic) to give a theory on analogy. When narrow-minded scientists object to Catastrophe Theory that it gives no more than analogies, or metaphors, they do not realise that they are stating the proper aim of Catastrophe Theory, which is to classify all possible types of analogous situations. ~ Rene Thom

We own the Federal Reserve. There is this misconception that the Federal Reserve is some private entity. But if I might give an analogy here, we - U.S. taxpayers - own all the stock in the Federal Reserve. ~ Gary Johnson

It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is unobstructive: without the latter it is deceptive. ~ Richard Whately

There must be a solemn and terrible aloneness that comes over the child as he takes those first independent steps. All this is lost to memory and we can only reconstruct it through analogies in later life ... To the child who takes his first steps and finds himself walking alone, this moment must bring the first sharp sense of the uniqueness and separateness of his body and his person, the discovery of the solitary self. ~ Selma Fraiberg

When language starts transcending materialism, one begins to speak of analogies instead of symbols. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. ~ George Orwell

If the eye never sleeps,
all dreams will naturally cease.
If the mind makes no discriminations,
the ten thousand things are as they are,
of single essence.
To understand the mystery of this One essence
is to be released from all entanglements.
When all things are seen equally
the timeless Self-essence is reached.
No comparisons or analogies are possible
in this causeless, relationless state.
Consider movement stationary
and the stationary in motion,
both movement and rest disappear.
When such dualities cease to exist
Oneness itself cannot exist.
To this ultimate finality
no law or description applies. ~ Sengcan

What's up with these people and the food analogies?! ~ Aziz Ansari

We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience. ~ Abraham Lincoln

No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head. ~ Anais Nin

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative. ~ Peter Morgan

For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting. ~ Plutarch

Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song. Until I heard 'Little Earthquakes' all my lyrics used really obvious analogies like rain for tears. ~ Hal Sparks

A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that's the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can't carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you'll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen. ~ James Dyson

The tragic style of Aeschylus (I use the word "style" in the sense it receives in sculpture, and not in the exclusive signification of the manner of writing,) is grand, severe, and not unfrequently hard: that of Sophocles is marked by the most finished symmetry and harmonious gracefulness: that of Euripides is soft and luxuriant; overflowing in his easy copiousness, he often sacrifices the general effect to brilliant passages. The analogies which the undisturbed development of the fine arts among the Greeks everywhere furnishes, will enable us, throughout to compare the epochs of tragic art with those of sculpture. Aeschylus is the Phidias of Tragedy, Sophocles her Polycletus, and Euripides her Lysippus. Phidias formed sublime images of the gods, but lent them an extrinsic magnificence of material, and surrounded their majestic repose with images of the most violent struggles in strong relief. Polycletus carried his art to perfection of proportion, and hence one of his statues was called the Standard of Beauty. Lysippus distinguished himself by the fire of his works; but in his time Sculpture had deviated from its original destination, and was much more desirous of expressing the charm of motion and life than of adhering to ideality of form. ~ August Wilhelm Schlegel

Can you not see the numerous designs made by God as signs, similitudes, or analogies of resurrection? He has placed them in every era, the alteration of day and night, even in the coming and going of clouds. ~ Said Nursi

The traditional arts and crafts are, in fact, "mysteries," with "secrets" that are not merely "tricks of the trade" of economic value (like the so-much-abused European "patents"), but pertain to the worldwide and immemorial symbolism of the techniques, all of which are analogies or imitations of the creative nature in operation ~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

John West is very good at reaching the heart of an issue using simple analogies. In summarizing the evidence of precision at Giza, he said, 'It's like finding a Porsche where only a wheelbarrow should be. ~ Christopher Dunn

The interaction, the interdependence, of life and death, which in nature is the source of an inexhaustible fecundity, is the basis of a set of analogies, to which agriculture and the rest of the human economy must conform in order to endure, and which is ultimately religious ... ~ Wendell Berry

Analogy is even slipperier than logic. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

It is natural to men to judge of things less known, by some similitude they observe, or think they observe, between them and things more familiar or better known. In many cases, we have no better way of judging. And, where the things compared have really a great similitude in their nature, when there is reason to think that they are subject to the same laws, there may be a considerable degree of probability in conclusions drawn from analogy. ~ Thomas Reid

Whoever wishes to acquire a deep acquaintance with Nature must observe that there are analogies which connect whole branches of science in a parallel manner, and enable us to infer of one class of phenomena what we know of another. It has thus happened on several occasions that the discovery of an unsuspected analogy between two branches of knowledge has been the starting point for a rapid course of discovery. ~ William Stanley Jevons

Gumption is the most important thing for a thru-hiker to maintain. Compare rounds of golf, one played while keeping score and one in which you hit a mulligan every time you are unhappy with a shot. In the latter case, being on the golf course loses significance. Rounds that are memorable are the ones that you make count. In a broader context, all rounds of golf are of no consequence, whether score is kept or not. But you are the center of your own universe. You are free to create meaning for yourself. When you attempt to capture the highlights without burdening yourself with the tedium, the highlights lose the foundation that elevates them to the status of "highlight." Analogies abound because a focused attitude defines the quality of all that we do. In playing a game, dieting, or hiking the AT, you benefit ~ David Miller

I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of the central characters has to be sacrificed. I have huge folders of details - research - with a story like Netherlands. Only a very small part of it gets used. The old iceberg analogy again. ~ Jim Shepard

I think humor is the social use. You can put anything in it. I think - yes, I speak heavily in analogies - it is like putting the medicine in apple sauce or a block of cheese for a dog. Not that anyone in this room is a dog in this scenario. ~ Sloane Crosley

Analogies are like lies. ~ Roman Payne

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations
and thus their analogies and metaphors
out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

I think zombies are the great analogy for all of our fears about all of the scary things that happen on our planet, and the potential for scariness on our planet. Being chased by anyone or anything can be scary. It is just a big, fun analogy. ~ Mireille Enos

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate. ~ Leon Krier

I have made some headway in addressing these questions, however, and succeeded in explaining how it is that the category of knowledge might play an important role in empirical theories. To the extent that talk of knowledge can be shown to play an explanatory role in such theories, the analogy I wish to make with paradigm natural kinds such as acids and aluminum starts to make a good deal of sense. This is, of course, connected with the issue of the role of intuitions in philosophy. ~ Hilary Kornblith

All the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. "Cataphatic" (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by "apophatic" (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly, but only at best analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things that God is not. ~ David Bentley Hart

The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people) should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last thirty years without looking for more such slopes to slide down. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

Its half a dozen legs, divided into segments – either four or five, it was difficult to count them - had an elegance of movement that Lily found enthralling. As though choreographed to a beat mimicking the thumping in her breast, the precise spasmodic jerks of their several bends made her think of Madonna dancing to Vogue. They had the faultless coordination of intertwining cutlery in the hands of a hungry magician – or of the Queen eating dinner alone. This rush of ridiculous analogies caused Lily to laugh with delight, loudly, now without the slightest fear that the fly might be disturbed, because this fly was unlike other flies, and Lily knew that it would know not to feel under threat. ~ Panayotis Cacoyannis

So is not mathematical analysis then not just a vain game of the mind? To the physicist it can only give a convenient language; but isn't that a mediocre service, which after all we could have done without; and, it is not even to be feared that this artificial language be a veil, interposed between reality and the physicist's eye? Far from that, without this language most of the initimate analogies of things would forever have remained unknown to us; and we would never have had knowledge of the internal harmony of the world, which is, as we shall see, the only true objective reality. ~ Henri Poincare

Growth comes through analogy; through seeing how things connect, rather than only seeing how they might be different. ~ Albert Einstein

You like that analogy? That was pretty good? ~ Shaquille O'Neal

She has all the right equipment to look sexy, pretty even. She just overdoes everything-like she's a coloring-book women who got scribbled on by a toddler, ~ Bonnie Shimko

If I was to really get at the burr in my saddle, it's not politics - and this is, I think, probably a horrible analogy - but I look at politicians as, they are doing what inherently they need to do to retain power. Their job is to consolidate power. When you go to the zoo and you see a monkey throwing poop, you go, 'That's what monkeys do, what are you gonna do?' But what I wish the media would do more frequently is say, 'Bad monkey. ~ Jon Stewart

All meaning comes from analogies. ~ Douglas Hofstadter

A recurrent theme in Kissinger's early writing is the historical ignorance of the typical American decision-maker. Lawyers, he remarked in 1968, are the "single most important group in Government, but they do have this drawback - a deficiency in history." For Kissinger, history was doubly important: as a source of illuminating analogies and as the defining factor in national self-understanding. Americans might doubt history's importance, but, as Kissinger wrote, "Europeans, living on a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight, feel in their bones that history is more complicated than systems analysis."
-Foreign Affairs, The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered, By Niall Ferguson ~ Niall Ferguson