What are 10 simple metaphor examples?

"The fog comes on little cat feet." Carl Sandburg, "Fog" (1916). That's a metaphor: a figure that says one thing IS another, transferring the qualities of one onto the other (no "like" or "as," that would be a simile). The ten below are short, easy to grasp, and every one of them is sourced to a real writer or speaker: Franklin, Shakespeare, Dickinson, van Gogh, Milton, Kennedy, Lakoff, plus one explicitly tagged everyday-speech entry. Most lists of "simple metaphors" are walls of recycled, unsourced phrases. These aren't.

"Time is money," Benjamin Franklin

Franklin wrote it in Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748): "Remember that time is money." Three words and a thesis. The metaphor transfers two qualities of money, countability and scarcity, onto time. That is why English then borrows the rest of money's vocabulary to talk about hours: we spend time, save it, waste it, invest it, budget it.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By (1980), call this kind of thing a conceptual metaphor: a single substitution that has spread across a whole vocabulary. You can't talk about time in English without using money's verbs. The figure isn't a flourish; it's the road the language is built on.

A working definition of metaphor sits behind every entry on this list, in case the figure itself feels slippery before the examples land.

"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare

From Jaques' speech in As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII, c. 1599):

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.

The metaphor is "the world is a stage." A stage is scripted, finite, watched. Each of those qualities transfers onto life as Jaques goes: lives have entrances and exits, people play parts, the parts change. Shakespeare doesn't state the substitution and move on. He keeps drawing on the source for several lines, which is what makes this also one of English's earliest famous extended metaphors. The figure unfolds across the passage instead of landing in a single sentence.

"Juliet is the sun," Shakespeare

Three words. Romeo at the balcony in Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene II, c. 1597): "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

The structure here is naked: X is Y, and nothing else in the line does any work. Read it as a teaching example. The qualities the sun carries onto Juliet, warmth, centrality, the thing the world orbits, arrive instantly and without decoration. There is no comparison, no "like," no clause unpacking the figure. The plainest possible shape of a metaphor, in two of its most quoted lines.

"The fog comes on little cat feet," Carl Sandburg

The whole of Sandburg's "Fog" (1916) is six lines:

The fog comes on little cat feet.

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

Sandburg never writes "the fog is a cat." He doesn't have to. The cat is implied through what's borrowed: little cat feet, sits looking, on silent haunches, then moves on. Body parts, posture, behavior. The metaphor rides on those instead of being stated. This is what's usually called an implied metaphor: the substitution is real, but it lives in verbs and details rather than the bare X-is-Y form. Useful as a reminder that metaphors don't have to announce themselves to count.

"Hope is the thing with feathers," Emily Dickinson

The opening stanza of Dickinson's poem c. 1862 (poem 254 in Johnson's numbering):

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all.

What makes this a model is the refusal. Dickinson doesn't say "hope is a bird." She says "the thing with feathers," and the figure works by indirection. Naming the bird would pin the metaphor to one image (a sparrow, a robin, a dove) and lose the rest. Refusing to name it keeps every bird available at once. The substitution is the figure; the indirection is the craft.

"Conscience is a man's compass," Vincent van Gogh

From a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1889: "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 clean teaching example because the source does specific work. A compass has properties: it orients you, it points to true north, the needle sometimes deviates, you correct course by it anyway. Van Gogh extends each property onto conscience in turn: orientation, occasional drift, the imperative to follow it through the deviation. One sentence, one metaphor, and an entire argument runs off it. The lesson here is that a single substitution can carry a paragraph's worth of thinking if the source is rich enough.

"Argument is war," George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

The opening example in Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980), and the one that reframes how to read the rest of this list. We say things like your claims are indefensible, I demolished his argument, I've never won an argument with him, he attacked every weak point, his criticisms were right on target.

The figure is so settled into ordinary English that we no longer feel it as one. But every italicized verb in that paragraph is borrowing from war: defend, demolish, win, attack, target. We don't talk about argument in English without using fighting's vocabulary. Lakoff and Johnson call these conceptual metaphors: substitutions deep enough to organize how a whole topic is talked about. The reason a "simple" metaphor list isn't really a list of fancy figures is that most metaphors are like this one. Invisible, settled, structural.

"The mind is its own place," John Milton

From Satan's speech in Paradise Lost, Book I (1667): "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

The metaphor is "the mind is a place." It gives interior life the qualities of geography: a place can be entered, mapped, lived in, transformed. Once that substitution lands in the first line, the second line can do something the bare claim could not, flip Heaven and Hell as if they were two rooms one could redecorate. Without the spatial metaphor in the first line, the second line has no ground to stand on. The figure is what allows the move.

"We have tossed our cap over the wall of space," John F. Kennedy

From Kennedy's speech at Rice University, September 12, 1962, the "we choose to go to the Moon" speech: "But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal?... we have tossed our cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it."

Tossing a cap over a wall is a small, almost reckless physical act borrowed from a child's dare (and from Frank O'Connor's memoir, which Kennedy may have had in mind). The metaphor transfers that act onto a national space program: once the cap is over, the only way to get it back is to go after it. Commitment becomes irreversible because the figure makes it irreversible. A useful counterexample to the "metaphors are decoration" assumption. This metaphor was load-bearing political argument.

"Work today was a nightmare," everyday speech

The everyday metaphor closes the list at the level the reader probably uses metaphors most often. Note the precision: the sentence says work was a nightmare, not that it felt like one. Felt like would be a simile. Was is the metaphor.

The qualities of a nightmare get transferred onto the day: helplessness, things going wrong faster than you can react, time distortion, the inability to wake up out of it. A working writer meets this kind of metaphor in dialogue, not in a poem. Worth noting how close it sits to a dead metaphor, which is the term for a figure so worn down by use that the reader no longer registers the substitution at all. One more usage cycle and nightmare will mean "bad day" with no ghost of sleep behind it.

What makes a metaphor land

Three patterns run across the ten examples that the unsourced "heart of gold / night owl" lists miss.

First, the substitution has to do specific work. There has to be something the source carries onto the target that no plain phrasing carries. Sandburg's fog as a cat tells you it's silent, slow, and indifferent in a way "the fog moved quietly" doesn't. Van Gogh's conscience as a compass gives you a needle that drifts and a direction worth correcting back to. The metaphor justifies its own existence by carrying meaning the literal version couldn't.

Second, the metaphor doesn't have to be the bare X-is-Y form. It can be implied (Sandburg), extended across many lines (Shakespeare, Milton, van Gogh), or spread across a whole vocabulary (Franklin, Lakoff). The shape varies; the substitution doesn't.

Third, the most common metaphors aren't fancy at all. Time is money, argument is war, work was a nightmare: that is the figure as it actually lives in English. Most of the metaphors any writer uses on a given day are settled enough that no one notices them, including the writer. The shapes the figure takes have names of their own: direct, implied, extended, dead, mixed. Each is a recognizable type of metaphor with a working definition behind it. The line between metaphor and simile is also worth pinning down, since "is" versus "is like" is the difference that decides which figure you've got.

The test of a "simple" metaphor isn't simple words. It's whether the substitution lands instantly, without explanation. Each of the ten above does. Notice the next metaphor you read in the wild today. It'll be in there somewhere.