“The great religions are all metaphor.”

—  Ray Bradbury

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. <!-- They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The great religions are all metaphor." by Ray Bradbury?
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury 401
American writer 1920–2012

Related quotes

G. K. Chesterton photo

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

" A Defense of Slang http://books.google.com/books?id=8WpaAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;all+slang+is+metaphor+and+all+metaphor+is+poetry&quot;&pg=PA110#v=onepage"
The Defendant (1901)

Maimónides photo

“For this reason, great theological scholars gave instruction in all such matters only by means of metaphors and allegories.”

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction
Context: You must know that if a person, who has attained a certain degree of perfection, wishes to impart to others, either orally or in writing, any portion of the knowledge which he has acquired of these subjects, he is utterly unable to be as systematic and explicit as he could be in a science of which the method is well known. The same difficulties which he encountered when investigating the subject for himself will attend him when endeavouring to instruct others: viz., at one time the explanation will appear lucid, at another time, obscure: this property of the subject appears to remain the same both to the advanced scholar and to the beginner. For this reason, great theological scholars gave instruction in all such matters only by means of metaphors and allegories.

Joseph Campbell photo
Starhawk photo

“Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)
Context: Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing. <!-- p. 209

Octavio Paz photo

“If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning
Source: Alternating Current (1967)
Context: If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 120

Dylan Moran photo

Related topics