“You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it" by James Gleick?
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James Gleick 15
American author, journalist, and biographer 1954

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“Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Variant: Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.

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“You can pray until you faint, but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.”

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) American civil rights activist (October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977)

As transcribed in “ We're on our way,” Speech before a mass meeting held at the negro Baptist school in Indianola, Mississippi https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/hamer-were-on-our-way-speech-text/ (September 1964)

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“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?"”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931)
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