Top 100 Quotes About Literal
#2. Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
Joan Didion
#3. Doesn't matter, does it?" said George. "They're just as dead. Their blood is on your hands." "They don't have blood." "Humans are only literal when they're ashamed of something.
Jack McDevitt
#4. I have grounded my preaching upon the literal word; he that pleases may follow me; he that will not may stay.
Martin Luther
#5. "I do not believe that Jesus, at the end of his earthly sojourn, returned to God by ascending in any literal sense into a heaven located somewhere in the sky. My knowledge of the size of this universe reduces that concept to nonsense."
John Shelby Spong
#6. I think that being an editor, someone who works with words, is very good training for being a translator because it trains you to be attentive to words in a very specific, very concrete, very literal way.
Ann Goldstein
#7. As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North Whitehead
#8. I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.
Philip Kitcher
#9. Poets ... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
#10. On the radio a rock group called the Motels were repeatedly singing the ingenious line Take the L out of lover, and it's over. Deep. Literal, but still deep. The Motels. Whatever happened to them?
Harlan Coben
#11. It's safer to use fiction, which will not be taken for literal truth, but which, like Jesus' stories, can tell the truth indirectly yetpowerfully.
Wayne Martindale
#12. Learn the literal meaning of the [Arabic] words; don't follow his explanations and interpretations. Only learn what God says. His words are divine messages, which you are free to interpret.
Malala Yousafzai
#13. The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#14. The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.
Iain McGilchrist
#15. For me, Satan and a literal hell are fables born of Christianity's desire to control humanity by increasing its fear of death.
Christopher Pike
#16. When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.
Keanu Reeves
#17. It is just possible that feminists have been literal-minded and, in pursuit of a political goal, have lost their sense of humour.
Mary Norris
#18. I took my fear to literal heights and went skydiving over a year ago. It was in that moment, gazing over the precipice of the plane, when I realized what scared me the most, the unknown.
Kathryn Budig
#19. Now, go knock 'em dead."
I assume he means that I should make a good impression at the party, and not to follow the literal interpretation of that expression.
Bree Despain
#20. Do not limit your Sacred Space to the literal, such as a small room or office. Allow this energy to flow from deep within, so that every where you go, no matter what the circumstance, you will always be immersed in the divine
Gary Hopkins
#21. Portals and doorways are common symbolic constructs that represent transformative rites of passage. To look for a literal portal would be like trying to locate the actual Gates of Heaven.
Dan Brown
#22. Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. In fact, the literal definition of the word "power" is "the ability to act.
Anthony Robbins
#23. I'd tell you to be careful, but I know you've got eyes in the back of your head." "Tried that once. Too disorienting." "You're a very literal man, Franks ...
Larry Correia
#24. Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while.Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal
Cassandra Clare
#25. I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings ... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
Ellsworth Kelly
#26. Hamilton was bug-eyed. "Who are those people?"
Jonah held his head. "Man, I should have known it was a mistake to say I'd be leaving town soon! Why do fans have to be so literal?"
"Are they going to let us go get the faxes?" Hamilton asked.
Jonah stared at him. "You're kidding, right?
Gordon Korman
#27. Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
G.K. Chesterton
#28. I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.
Anne Lamott
#29. Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#30. A complete fast is a complete and literal denial of self. It is the truest prayer.
Mahatma Gandhi
#32. Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society - that is decadence.
Gore Vidal
#33. I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith.
Francis Collins
#34. If realistic fiction is primarily metonymic, fantasy is inescapably metaphoric; because the presence of the impossible blocks a literal reading, we are invited to look at Fred and his world as some sort of iconic stand-in for everyday life, rather than as an extension from it. By
Brian Attebery
#35. We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."
Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth
#36. Sometimes the autobiographical link in each story is very literal, like I did work at The Texas School for the Blind, and I did once lose a mattress out of the back of a friend's truck.
Arthur Bradford
#37. When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#38. I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. And it was way to literal for me.
Mitch Hedberg
#39. Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.
J.I. Packer
#40. I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.
Anne Waldman
#41. His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.
Graham Greene
#42. I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.
Charles Darwin
#43. We're literal people, you and me. Whatever the most obvious interpretation is, that's our truth.
Brenna Yovanoff
#44. In entirety, valentine is a FUCKING DAY, rather than the sanctity of its literal meaning.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#45. I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
Elvis Costello
#46. I'd like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks. It'd be so damn literal! You are using that machine to it's exact purpose!
Mitch Hedberg
#48. Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.
Amy Waldman
#49. If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away.
Ken Ham
#50. She was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#51. At heart, science is the quest for awesome - the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It's a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives.
Sean Carroll
#52. I had a house in Haiti, in the hills above the North Atlantic coast. The house appeared as if out of a dream: my dream to have a foothold in the country. Like many concepts do in Haiti, the phrase 'pied a terre' became literal, material.
Madison Smartt Bell
#53. I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.
Octavia E. Butler
#54. God's truth is literal truth. The illumined mind has more operative cells. In reclaiming the mystical, we take back our whole selves. Formerly barren mental lands spring to new life through the planting of spiritual seeds.
Marianne Williamson
#55. Sci fi allowed us to be more true to the western than maybe even doing a literal western.
Roberto Orci
#56. Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it's built on literal sand.
Bruce Sterling
#57. We know that children with autism like order, that they are often very visual and that they can be quite literal. They deserve beautiful resources and symbols that make sense. If a picture does not explain visually, it is pointless and the child will stop looking to the pictures for information.
Adele Devine
#58. A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
Garry Winogrand
#59. Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
Toni Morrison
#60. It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the slaves, can be heard from dark till bed time, on Epps' plantation, any day almost during the entire period of the cotton-picking season.
Solomon Northup
#61. One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It's like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.
Cheryl Strayed
#62. Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
Jacques Barzun
#63. The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#64. Apathy is just lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence.
Anonymous
#65. The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
Karl Marx
#66. How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain."
"Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily.
"My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there.
G. Willow Wilson
#67. God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him.
Margaret Atwood
#68. We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus ...
John Green
#69. Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.
Poul Anderson
#71. The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
#72. To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.
Richard Mabey
#73. If God was so literal in his resurrections, humanity would be brought back in a state of decay so advanced that the marks of dissection would seem minor in comparison.
Helene Wecker
#74. I don't read the Bible as the literal word of God; I don't view Jesus as a God. I've rejected both those statements. I view Jesus as a model for how we should live, and by that definition I do consider myself a Christian.
Tim DeChristopher
#75. The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be reborn at the start of its cycle - December 25.
David Icke
#76. Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.
Anne Waldman
#77. There was a period of time during the 'Jagged Little Pill' era where I don't think I laughed for about two years. It was a survival mode, you know. It was an intense, constant, chronic over-stimulation and invasion of energetic and physical literal space.
Alanis Morissette
#78. Most men I know rely on women to do all the literal dirty work.
Elizabeth Banks
#79. I tend to be kind of literal about translation. I think it's important to present the writer as closely as possible.
Ann Goldstein
#80. I believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. And I say no, it's not, Dad. Well, I believe that it is. Well, you know, some people believe they're Napoleon. That's fine. Beliefs are neat. Cherish them, but don't share them like they're the truth.
Bill Hicks
#81. Without subtext you have a flat, linear world; everything is literal, everything spoken is meant. With subtext the writer is able to access the gap between language and thought, and
John Yorke
#82. Try all things by the written word, and let all bow down before it. You are in danger of [fanaticism] every hour, if you depart ever so little from Scripture; yea, or from the plain, literal meaning of an text, taken in connection with the context.
John Wesley
#83. You've got to get as literal as you can get to convince people sometimes that you can do something.
Gillian Jacobs
#84. And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose.
C.S. Lewis
#85. I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.
W. Eugene Smith
#86. Within the Christian tradition, fundamentalism arose in the 19th century as an effort to push back against modern' readings of the Bible that suggested everything in the text wasn't true in some literal sense.
Jay Parini
#87. The best conversationalists don't just engage on the literal, surface level of conversation. They listen instead to tonality, pay attention to eye contact, note shifts in body language.
Charlie Houpert
#88. People are incredibly literal sometimes in how they view you. You have dark hair and pale skin? You must be brooding. The second you dye your hair blond and get a spray tan, people treat you as if you're a bit stupider and happier.
Anna Paquin
#89. I've always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal.
Portia Doubleday
#90. It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
#91. The literal Greek translation is "school for naked exercise." Which made toweling off the stationary bike even more important.
A. J. Jacobs
#92. I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.
David Salle
#93. If I see a fashion show with literal influences, it doesn't make me think any more. It doesn't make me dream.
Raf Simons
#94. All maps are distorted, they are not literal fact.
Paula Scher
#95. Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association.
Albert Murray
#96. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. It's frat-cute Greg. I continue to have the literal worst taste in men.
Kelly Thompson
#97. Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
Carl Sagan
#98. 'Mysticism' here means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world.
Wilhelm Reich
#100. I did have a literal shed of fan mail once. It was literally filled with, like, 25 of those giant mail cartons.
Andrew Keegan
