Analogy Quotes

“At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking.

Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“The words you can’t find, you borrow.

We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

We are not quite novels.

The analogy he is looking for is almost there.

We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.

In the end, we are collected works.

He has read enough to know there are no collections where each story is perfect. Some hits. Some misses. If you’re lucky, a standout. And in the end, people only really remember the standouts anyway, and they don’t remember those for very long.

No, not very long.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness.”
― Michael Grant, Light

“To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of their respective individual’s knowledge and belief?”
― Victor Frankl

“That's the thing about rocks--they don't break easily. When I held them, I wanted to be like them-strong and steady, weathered but not broken.”
― Ellen Dreyer, Glow Stone, the

“Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.”
― Sheldon L. Glashow

“Yeast is to flour as action is to ambition. Rising to success requires adding and alternating starters.”
― Ryan Lilly

“According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.

For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found.

Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are perfect and cannot be improved; the Darwinian theory simply affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but admits the possibility of indefinite improvement.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Criticism on "The Origin of Species"

“Initially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, but the storm occluded the sky, denying us the stars. At the moment, I needed to see a firmament of stars, needed to gaze past the moon and through the constellations, needed to see what can't be seen--infinity.”
― Dean Koontz, Innocence

“They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion).”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“More about the selection theory: Jerne meant that the Socratic idea of learning was a fitting analogy for 'the logical basis of the selective theories of antibody formation': Can the truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned, it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno [ ... ] namely, that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows, one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know, one cannot search for, since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent.”
― Niels Kaj Jerne

“Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.”
― Grove Karl Gilbert

“Fracture lines etch the surface of the glass box as if a body fell from the sky and landed on it. He doesn't hear the impact, can't smell the blood.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.”
― Thomas Cathcart, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

“The words were clumsy in my mouth, like typing with hammers.”
― David Levithan, Another Day

“Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence; we are assured of meeting there no obstacles; but of all these ways, which will lead us most promptly to our goal? Who shall tell us which to choose? We need a faculty which makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is this faculty. It is necessary to the explorer for choosing his route; it is not less so to the one following his trail who wants to know why he chose it.”
― Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science

“By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story

“Just like literature, wine takes time to learn. Before having access to the emotion of a stunning poem or to the vigor of a captivating novel, we all had to go through a long initiation. First, we need to learn the alphabet, the sound of each letter. In wine, that would be learning about the grapes and their characteristics. Then, once we master our letters, we need to learn the arrangements of letters, the pronunciation, the grammar, the structure of sentences. Now we can read. In wine, that would be the stage when we start noticing differences between two reds. You no longer drink wine: you start drinking this wine.”
― Olivier Magny

“Elms are dying all over the place, it's Dutch elm disease. [...] It came from America on a load of logs, and it's a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that's why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you'd never think it was part of all the others. You'd see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises "fresh lobster" as the speciality of the house. Loving lobster, the literalist simply places his order and waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all—perhaps it's a goose! And, whatever it is, it need not be "fresh" in any conventional sense—for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence—what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for. Consequently, the appeal of literalism isn't difficult to see. Human beings reflexively demand it in almost every area of their lives. It seems to me that religious people, to the extent that they're 'certain' that their scripture was written or inspired by the Creator of the universe, demand it too. - pg. 67-68”
― Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

“Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition- and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, evEryThing is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scare here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking TO do- clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth-the naked shining truth.”
― Agatha Christie

“The sutras liken reincarnation to the relationship between teachers and students. A singing teacher teaches students how to sing. His students learn techniques and benefit from direct experiential advice from their teacher. But the teacher doesn't remove a song from his throat and insert it into a student's mouth. Similarly, reincarnation is a continuity of everything we have learnt, like lighting one candle from another, or a face and its reflection in a mirror.”
― Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, Not For Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices

“Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“Silvia Dunne's voice sounded calm and even, but April knew her mother was like a grenade with the pin out - she could explode any minute.”
― Mia James

“I have spoken of analogy as a constructive method. This, however, should be used only for suggestion, for it is most dangerous. Often we use an analogy and are quite unaware of it. Thus many social and political thinkers have called society an "organism," and have proceeded to deal with it as if it were a large animal. They have thought not in terms of the actual phenomena under consideration, but in terms of the analogy. In so far as the terms of the analogy were more concrete than those of the phenomena, their thinking has been made easier. But no analogy will ever hold good throughout, and consequently these thinkers have often fallen into error.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

“The quickest way to detect error in analogy is to carry it out as far as it will go—and further. Every analogy will break down somewhere. Any analogy if carried out far enough becomes absurd.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

“Another way to find whether an analogy is fallacious is to see whether you can discover a counter analogy. Surely this is the most effective practice in refuting analogy in argument.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

“It is best to avoid analogy except for purposes of suggestion, or as a rhetorical device for explaining an idea already arrived at by other means.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science