What are 10 examples of metaphors?

Juliet is the sun. Three words, no "like," no "as." The qualities of one thing (light, warmth, the body the day orients around) get transferred onto another. That is the test for a metaphor, and the ten below all pass it. The catch is that almost every list of metaphor examples on the open web fails the test that matters next: the examples are unsourced, stock, invented for the lesson plan. The ten here are sourced (author, work, year), drawn on purpose from across the writing you actually meet, and each one comes with a sentence on what the metaphor is doing in the line.

"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare, As You Like It (c. 1599)

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.

Jaques opens the speech by stating the equation outright: world equals stage. He does not hedge it with "like," and he does not explain it. He just sets it down and then runs the rest of the monologue on top of it. The next line, "They have their exits and their entrances," already assumes the world is a stage; you only have exits and entrances if you are in a play. The seven ages that follow (the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier) are roles, because the men and women have already been called players.

This is the canonical example of an extended metaphor: a single comparison opened in one sentence and then carried through an entire passage, each line drawing on the same equation without restating it. Once the figure has been planted, it does not need to be repeated; the speech assumes it.

"Juliet is the sun," Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1597)

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Three words do almost all the work: Juliet is the sun. No "like," no qualification, no comparison particle. The equation is bare. What transfers across it is light, warmth, and the thing the speaker now orients his day around. The sun is the body Romeo's life moves with respect to; from this sentence forward, so is Juliet.

Compare what a more cautious writer would have written: "Juliet is like the sun." That is a simile. It is the same comparison hedged with one word, and it lands softer for the hedge. The metaphor is the form Romeo can use because he means it.

"Hope is the thing with feathers," Emily Dickinson, poem #314 (c. 1861)

"Hope" is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul.

Dickinson takes an abstract noun (hope) and gives it a concrete body (a small bird). The reason she does this is mechanical: abstractions cannot do things. You cannot have hope perch, sing through a storm, or stop singing. But you can have a bird do all of those, and once hope has been declared a bird, the rest of the poem can move it through verbs that an abstract noun could not have taken.

This is the standard move when a writer needs to make something abstract available to verbs. Pick a body for it. The body does not need to be argued for; the metaphor just gives it.

"Time is money," Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)

Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense.

Franklin's sentence is the standard example of a metaphor on its way to becoming a dead one. It has been quoted, repeated, and paraphrased so often that most readers no longer feel the figure underneath the phrase; "time is money" arrives as a saying, not as a comparison.

The grammar is still a metaphor, though. Time is not literally money. Franklin is treating one thing as another so he can argue that hours not worked are hours spent. What gets worn out is the felt-ness of the figure, not the figure itself. Every metaphor is fresh the first time a reader meets it; a dead metaphor is one whose figure has worn through to invisibility, even though the grammar is still doing its job inside the saying.

"Her voice is full of money," F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money — that inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.

Gatsby says it; Nick repeats it back to himself; the next sentence treats it as obvious. A voice cannot literally hold money, so the metaphor forces two senses to share a slot: hearing and value. You can hear money, in this sentence, the way you can hear a key change.

The figure is what some critics call synesthetic: it crosses the categories the language usually keeps apart. That is what gives the line its lift in the novel. Daisy's voice has been described half a dozen times by this point in the book, and none of those descriptions caught what Gatsby catches in three words. The metaphor is doing work no literal sentence has done.

"I am the good shepherd," John 10:11 (KJV)

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

The speaker calls himself a shepherd outright. The verse then immediately uses the comparison rather than restating it: a good shepherd lays down his life for the flock, and so will this speaker. The form is the same one Shakespeare uses in Romeo's window scene: name the equation in one clause, act on it in the next.

Scripture is one example domain among several here, not a hermeneutic claim. The KJV is where this particular metaphor lives in English-language rhetorical tradition, which is why we cite it that way. The interesting thing for the working writer is the two-sentence shape: declare X is Y, then write the next sentence as if X already were Y. That is how the figure is supposed to work.

"The mind is its own place," Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I (1667)

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Satan compresses an argument into a metaphor. Once the mind has been given the spatial properties of a place, the rest of the sentence can use those properties: the mind has weather, you can be inside it, it can contain other places. Make a Heaven of Hell assumes all of that. The line cannot do its philosophical work as a literal claim ("the mind is influential over your perception of your circumstances"); the literal version says less and lands flat.

Metaphor as compression is one of the figure's main reasons for existing. A whole argument about the mind's relation to its conditions sits under one short clause, and the clause carries the argument because the equation has already been struck.

"America has tossed its cap over the wall of space," John F. Kennedy, "Address at Rice University" (1962)

For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace... We choose to go to the moon. Our nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

The literal version of this claim is the speech's actual argument: a country has committed itself to going to the moon and cannot now retreat. Said that way, it is a position paper. Kennedy makes it visible by importing a child's playground move, where you throw your hat over a wall so you have to climb after it. Once the cap is over the wall, the climb is forced.

Metaphor is doing the work an oration needs done here. The argument has not changed; what has changed is whether the audience can see it.

"Conscience is a man's compass," Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh (1889)

One must never trust the occasion when one is without difficulties or when everything is going smoothly... Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities when directing one's course by it, one must still try to follow its direction.

A compass orients you when you cannot see where you are going. Van Gogh transfers that quality (orientation under uncertainty) onto conscience. The next clause uses the metaphor: the needle sometimes deviates, you still try to follow its direction. He is not commenting on compasses; he is talking about how to live, and the figure has given him the language for it.

The example matters because it does not come from literature. It is a private letter between two brothers. Metaphor is a basic move in any writing where someone is trying to be precise about an internal state, and that includes the kind of writing nobody set out to publish.

"The fog comes / on little cat feet," Carl Sandburg, "Fog" (1916)

The fog comes on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

Sandburg never says fog is a cat. He gives the fog a cat's feet, a cat's haunches, a cat's silent arrival, and a cat's habit of leaving when it is done; the equation is left for the reader to assemble. This is the implied form of the figure: the metaphor runs underneath the surface of the language rather than being written into it.

The direct form ("Juliet is the sun") states the comparison and lets the body of the work act on it. The implied form does the reverse: it acts on the comparison without ever stating it, and trusts the reader to back-form the equation. The two forms are doing the same thing from opposite ends.

"I am a rock, I am an island," Paul Simon, "I Am a Rock" (1965)

I am a rock, I am an island.

Two metaphors in two clauses, both in the direct X is Y form. The speaker takes inanimate things (a rock, an island) and asks the listener to read them as withdrawal from human contact. The qualities transferred are concrete: a rock does not feel; an island is cut off by water on every side.

The interesting beat is that the song knows what it is doing. The narrator who insists on being a rock is being undercut by the song around him; the chorus is a confession, not a creed. The metaphors function exactly as metaphors are supposed to (one thing called another, qualities transferred), and the song's emotional work happens because they function. The figure is not a literary mode; it is a tool, and a pop lyric reaches for the same tool a Shakespeare line does.

What These Ten Have in Common

Pull the ten back into a single test: a metaphor calls one thing another, with no "like" and no "as." In its implied form, it treats one thing as another without saying so. The qualities of the second thing (the source) transfer onto the first (the target). That is the figure.

Apply the test to the examples. Juliet is the sun transfers light and warmth onto a person. Hope is the thing with feathers transfers a small body onto an abstraction so the rest of the poem can use verbs. The fog comes on little cat feet transfers feline movement onto weather without ever naming the cat. I am a rock transfers unfeeling and inertness onto a singer. The structure is the same in every case; only the source-target pair changes.

Notice that the ten span Shakespeare, Dickinson, Milton, scripture, a 1748 pamphlet, a 1925 novel, a 1962 speech, an 1889 letter, a 1916 poem, and a 1965 pop song. The figure does not require literary register. It is one of the tools by which English compresses a claim about the world; once a writer can see the move, it shows up everywhere. The closest neighbor is the simile, and the difference is whether the comparison particle ("like" or "as") is left in: metaphor calls the equation outright, simile hedges it.