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George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphor is a structure of thought, not a figure of speech. This graph lays out the book's ideas: nodes are concepts and named metaphors, edges show what grounds, mirrors, or strains against what, and the loops on the right are the circuits the argument keeps running.
Coda — thought loops
The big ideas the book keeps cycling through, each followed from one concept to the next until it comes back around.
Bodies stand against gravity, so up feels like alertness and joy. Up then gathers quantity, goodness, status and power. Those values come back to the body as posture: heads held high, shoulders slumped.
Where it settlesOne spatial axis carrying a whole vocabulary of value.
Thinking of argument as combat gives it sides, ground and strategy. People then argue that way, and the practice makes the metaphor feel like a plain description of what arguing is.
Where it settlesA habit that looks like a fact until you picture argument as a dance.
Time becomes something you spend, save and waste. Institutions are built on that idea, and living inside them makes time feel like money again.
Where it settlesA cultural loop, not a human universal.
Ideas become things, words become boxes, talk becomes shipping. The listener is assumed to find the same object inside, so the idea comes out as it went in.
Where it settlesMeaning starts to look like something you own rather than something worked out between people.
Two experiences that keep happening together become one connection. Every later use of "warm" for kindness runs the same link and strengthens it.
Where it settlesPrimary metaphor: the body teaching the mind its first abstractions.
Love as a collaborative work of art shows similarities no one saw before, people act on them, and the experience they get back invites the next metaphor.
Where it settlesChanging a metaphor can change the thing it describes.
Contact with the world gives understanding a shape, much of that shape is metaphorical, truth is judged against it, and action based on those truths changes the world we engage.
Where it settlesNeither pure fact nor pure feeling, but experience in between.