A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

I am a normal guy from the Black Forest, and I do not compare myself with the geniuses.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.

Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

I’ve done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they’re going to be compared directly against other ads.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

There is only a finger’s difference between a wise man and a fool.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

We believe that according the name ‚investors‘ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‚romantic.‘

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Doing a show for three weeks is nothing like doing a show for seven seasons.

The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

The only difference between Benito and Bad Bunny is 16 million followers on Instagram. And the money that Bad Bunny has in the bank. Benito had, like, $7. The numbers are different, but I’m still the same. Even my insecurities remain the same.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.