“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
―
―
“The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest.”
― Nailed
― Nailed
“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”
― 2666
― 2666
“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.”
―
―
“Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a
red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of
someone who was annoyed by it.”
― Lords and Ladies
red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of
someone who was annoyed by it.”
― Lords and Ladies
Shailesh’s 2025 Year in Books
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