This study examines how the emotions love and anger are metaphorically conceptualised in English and Korean, focusing on embodied commonalities and culture-specific differences. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we analyse a validated corpus of attested metaphorical expressions for love and anger in both languages (confirmed by native speakers) to identify semi-universal metaphors (rooted in shared human embodiment) versus culture-specific metaphors (shaped by linguistic and cultural context). The English and Korean data reveal numerous shared metaphorical mappings: for example, both languages conceptualise love in terms of physical journeys, heat, unity, and illness, and anger in terms of internal pressure, fire, and explosive force – reflecting universal physiological and experiential bases. At the same time, distinct differences emerge. Korean metaphors often emphasise emotional restraint and fate, for example “swallowing anger” or love as predestined connection, aligning with cultural norms, whereas English metaphors more readily invoke outward expressions and individual agency, for example “blow off steam” or love as a game or war. These findings suggest that while embodied cognition yields broadly similar metaphorical structures for fundamental emotions across languages, cultural context can modulate metaphor usage and salience. The paper discusses implications for cross-cultural understanding of emotions and supports the CMT claim that metaphors are both universal cognitive structures and cultural tools encoding distinct worldviews. The comparative insights contribute to metaphor studies by addressing a less-studied language pairing and highlighting the interplay between shared embodiment and cultural specificity in emotion conceptualisation.