Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul de Man

Metaphors don’t just decorate thought; they outlive it. Paul de Man’s line is a coolly unsettling reminder that what feels like “mere language” often has more staying power than anything we can verify. Facts can be corrected, updated, disproven, archived. Metaphors don’t die so easily because they attach themselves to the machinery that interprets facts in the first place: the frames, intuitions, and narrative habits that tell us what counts as evidence and what we’re supposed to feel about it.

De Man, a key figure in deconstruction, isn’t making a Hallmark point about poetic beauty. He’s pointing to a structural asymmetry: facts are brittle because they depend on conditions (records, institutions, trust, shared methods). Metaphors are tenacious because they travel light. They migrate across centuries, disciplines, and media, smuggling assumptions inside an image. Call the state a “ship,” the market a “machine,” the mind a “computer,” and you’ve already limited what solutions seem plausible. The metaphor becomes a policy, a psychology, a morality play.

The subtext is also a critique of intellectual confidence. Even the most rigorous criticism can’t step outside rhetoric; it can only switch rhetorics. In de Man’s world, language isn’t a transparent window onto reality but a system with its own momentum, prone to self-reinforcing figures. The line lands with extra bite in a late-20th-century climate obsessed with exposing ideology: it suggests that debunking “falsehoods” is easier than dislodging the metaphors that keep regenerating them.