Puzzle Metaphor Quotes

That’s what i love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff were your not sure what the poets talking about. You may have an idea, but you cant be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in ―a symbol for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor? ...I hated poetry until someone showed me how to appreciate it. He told me to see poetry as a puzzle. Its up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.

One more piece of sky in the jigsaw puzzle of our school.

I want to give you a present.” Pandora’s dark winged brows drew together. “A literal present?” Gabriel responded with a puzzled smile. “Yes. How could it be otherwise?” “I thought ‘give you a present’ might be a metaphor.” Her gaze flicked in the direction of the bedroom. “For that.” He began to laugh. “I wouldn’t presume to flatter myself quite so extravagantly. You’ll have to inform me later if my lovemaking is a gift or not.

Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it’s our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is.

Her heart didn’t break once. It had broken multiple times over the last year—over the last decade, really—and each time she’d started to put the puzzle back together, to reconstruct her heart and soul with metaphorical superglue, they would shatter again. The pieces were getting smaller, less recognizable, more difficult to reconnect with each blow.

Part 2 updates the study of judgment heuristics and explores a major puzzle: Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

I conclude this section with a possibly puzzling postscript on the meaning of the word “literal.” What is the literal meaning of a parable? Its literal meaning is its parabolic meaning. What is the literal meaning of a poem? Its literal meaning is its poetic meaning. What is the literal meaning of a symbolic or metaphorical narrative? Its literal meaning is its symbolic or metaphorical meaning. But in modern Western culture over the last few centuries, “literal” has most often been confused with “factual,” and factuality has been elevated over the metaphorical. Hence when people say they take stories in the Bible and the gospels “literally,” they most often mean “factually.” Thus the difference is not ultimately a literal versus a metaphorical reading, but a factual versus a metaphorical reading. And to read a story factually rather than metaphorically often involves a misjudgment about the literary genre of a story. When the metaphorical is understood factually, the result is a story hard to believe. But when a metaphorical narrative is understood metaphorically, it may indeed be powerfully and challengingly true.

Robert crossed Pulteney Bridge with a light step. He grinned at the boy raking odiferous horse manure to the curb and tipped him well for his service. He nodded—with a grin—to the puzzled driver of a hack heading into the city. And he bowed—with a grin—as he stepped aside to allow the weary-looking woman with two toddlers to pass. None to see him would realize that Robert had fallen under the hooves of a racing carriage and risen from the other side unscathed—metaphorically speaking, of course.

What lies in bed, and stands in bed? First white, then red The plumper it gets The better the old woman likes it?" "A dork! Crude, Roland! But I like it! I LIKE IT!" "Your answer is wrong. A good riddle is sometimes a puzzle in words, like Jake's about the river, but sometimes it's more like a magician's trick, making you look in one direction while it's going somewhere else." "It's a double." "Is it a strawberry? Of course it is. It's like the fire-riddle. There's a metaphor hidden inside it. Once you understand the metaphor, you can solve the riddle.

A maze is a puzzle to be solved, with twists and turns and dead ends. It requires logical, analytical thinking and usually has a different way out than the way in. The maze could be a metaphor of struggling through life, going one way and then another until the exit takes your by surprise. A maze signifies entrapment, while the labyrinth, with its unicursal path leading into the center and out again the same way, provides enlightenment. It's the process, the journey into your deepest self, your soul, the part where God abides. It's a passive path, a surrender even, to an order and design repeated through creation. A sacred geometry.

There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now. But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

a Chinese poem says: Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple. For the image represents a number of qualities which are, in fact, aspects of the same thing. It represents the sage’s freedom and detachment of mind, a skylike consciousness in which experience moves without leaving any stain. As another poem says: The bamboo shadows sweep the stairs, But stir no dust. Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its natural surroundings. The image also represents the fact that the way of the sage cannot be traced and followed, since no authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions. But there is actually the most intimate connection between these two apparently separate uses of the metaphor—the way of the sage, on the one hand, and the impermanence of life, on the other. And the connection reveals the one deepest and most central principle of those Asian philosophies which so puzzle the Western mind by identifying the highest wisdom with what, to us, seems the doctrine of abject despair. Indeed, the word despair in a particular sense is the proper translation of the Hindu–Buddhist term nirvana—to “de-spirate,” to breathe out, to give up the ghost. We cannot understand how the Asians manage to equate this despair with ultimate bliss—unless, as we are prone to suppose, they are after all a depraved and spineless people, long accustomed to fatalism and resignation.

So you have no faith in the gods?’ Jiang asked. ‘I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,’ she replied. ‘I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.’ She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating. Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be. But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response. He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: ‘If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?’ ‘But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?’ Jiang countered. ‘Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?’ ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Rin. ‘Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.’ Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library. And came back with more questions still. ‘But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?’ ‘Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.’ ‘Why should I’ ‘Because I know you want power.’ He tapped her forehead again. ‘But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?

On what he loves most about writing: "Everything. Every single thing. I love that first blank page, finding that perfect first line, the moment your character says something unexpected and you realize they're a proper character. I love when it takes over a part of your brain and sits there, like a puzzle you're always working on, even while you're talking with friends or eating dinner with your wife. I love talking to people who've read my book and hearing their theories. I love beautiful writing, lines so good they bug you a week later. I love the collaborative spirit of editing and the joy of a good metaphor. Everything. Every moment. Wouldn't change a thing.

The Modern Movement, demanding a new architecture for a new age, swept away these ‘styles’. That new architecture was supposed to be metaphor-free. Puzzled viewers soon began to invent their own metaphors. They spoke of cardboard boxes, matchboxes and filing cabinets. Despite designers’ outraged protestations, these boxy buildings were metaphors and had meaning. The messages they carried were ‘modernity’ and ‘functionalism’.

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.

As ingenuity gaps widen the gulfs of wealth and power among us, we need imagination, metaphor and empathy more than ever, to help us remember each other’s essential humanity. I believe this will be the central challenge of the coming century—one that will shape everything else about who we are and what we become. Anatol Rapoport, a pioneering mathematical psychologist and one of the wisest people I have ever known, once told me: “The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community.” Have we paid enough attention to the moral development of the global civilization we are creating today? A sense of community, of shared humanity, isn’t the only thing we need. If we’re to maintain and improve our civilization in the next century, we also need to close, as best we can, those ingenuity gaps that debilitate people and societies. And here a final metaphor—the metaphor of flight—may point us in the right direction. The idea of flight wound its way through my entire quest to piece together the ingenuity puzzle.

In fundamentalist Christianity, the spiritual kingdom of God is described metaphorically as a family. God is a heavenly father, Jesus is the dutiful son, union with God is called marriage, the church is a bride, people who are saved become his children, the church community is called a family, and fellow members are called brothers and sisters in the Lord. (Notice that there is no mother. I find this puzzling and disturbing.)

Jensen, R. (2002). "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization. Journal of Social History,36(2), 405-429. Retrieved August 26, 2021 The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced “Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply.” This “NINA” slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a “golden mountain” or had “streets paved with gold.” But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. The fact that Irish vividly remember “NINA” signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic groups complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs that said employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through a window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle-class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. … Irish Americans have all heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had “legs”: people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up.

God was, he said, light. Not metaphorically. Not abstractly. But literally all of the attributes we associate with photons of light—a ubiquitous presence that moves freely through space and time, an energy with the creative capacities to generate life on a molecular level—these are the qualities of the creative power we know as God.

Our mental frames change the way we interpret the world. And that’s why I think these optical illusions are such powerful metaphors for life. I’ve come to believe in the importance of frames and reframing. As with the vase and the face, there are often different ways to interpret the same situation.

But it doesn’t happen that way usually,” puzzled the comely ecstatica. “They like to haunt stationary places, houses, churchyards—but moving trains? notional rail lines? hardly ever. If at all.” “Something’s afoot,” groaned the Cohen, with an inflection almost of gastric distress. “And did somebody just blow up a train line?” Lew feeling somewhat out of his depth here, “or . . .” “Tried to,” she said, “thought about it, dreamed it, or saw something—analogous to an explosion. Death is a region of metaphor, it often seems.” “Not always decipherable,” added the Cohen, “but in this case Eastern-Questionable, beyond a doubt. More Renfrew and Werfner melodrama. Queer Street for the Tiresome Twins, I’d say. Not immediately clear which will murder the other, but the crime itself is as certain as the full moon.

The most confusing places to start are midsize, rapidly growing companies. That’s because parts of the company are growing quickly, with an emphasis on execution, and other parts have largely stabilized, with ideas becoming the more valued currency. Long bones have growth plates at their ends, which is where the growth happens, and the middle doesn’t grow. This is a pretty apt metaphor for rapidly growing companies, and a useful mental model when trying to understand why your behaviors might not be resonating in a new role.