Quotes About Literalism

#1. If there were such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood.

Cassandra Clare

#2. It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

Simon Schama

#3. It's not gray," Clary felt compelled to point out. "It's green."
"If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood," said Jace.

Cassandra Clare

#4. 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

#5. The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.

Sam Harris

#6. Selective literalism' is another attempt in a very long line of techniques designed and intended to shape God into our own image".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#7. We indulge in semantics and slippery-slope rhetoric to excuse injustice. We read a few verse about women in a vacuum of literalism and prideful laziness.

Sarah Bessey

#8. In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

Stephen Jay Gould

#9. In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each ...

Stephen Jay Gould

#10. Dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion.

Mark A. Noll

#11. So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

E. O. Wilson

#12. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#13. All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

Stephen Jay Gould

#14. But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.

J.I. Packer

#15. Entrenched scriptural literalism is, in my opinion, completely out of touch with reality.

Malcolm Boyd

#16. When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Joseph Campbell

#17. The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.

Sam Harris

#18. In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It's time we did the same for homophobia.

William Sloane Coffin

#19. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.

Sam Harris

#20. To live without that enchantment of beauty is to interpret frugality and simple living with a puritan literalism

John Lane

#21. If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I'll never achieve it; in the same way that I'll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

#22. Literalism involves a fundamental misconception of the mental processes of biblical man and ignorance of his modes of self-expression. It thus misrepresents the purport of the narrative, obscures the meaningful and enduring in it and destroys its relevancy.

Nahum M. Sarna

#23. 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

#24. The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

Reza Aslan

#25. A society where you're not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that's being ushered in.

David Mitchell

#26. Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.

Aldous Huxley

#27. Timidity keeps me safe and sad in a narrow room.

Mason Cooley

#28. Elections are a Western jerk-off.

John Le Carre

#29. When Paul announced himself in a rather formal way to the secretary, he said simply, "I am Watzlawick." She suspected he was a new psychiatric patient showing up for an appointment at the wrong time, and she interpreted his introduction as, "I am not Slavic.

Paul Watzlawick

#30. They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

Edmund Wilson

#31. Who are we? We're not perfect but we're not worthless. Scripture tells us that we're beautifully made, but broken.

Trip Lee

#32. You have a little bit of talent, a certain amount of good fortune and a lot of hard work in pursuit of whatever truth you can find in it, and if you are really lucky, a terrific partner and I have that and those four things worked out for me.

Donald Sutherland

#33. Divorce is the key that opens the strongbox where the bonds of matrimony are kept under wedlock.

Evan Esar

#34. How much easier my life would be if I did not love you! I thought. How much less painful, but how much plainer. How much less color there would be in the world.

Cameron Dokey

#35. You know, I want to help my country. Definitely I can help them, simply by winning races. Sure, they can follow my path to a good career. But for me it is not enough. I want to be more than that. In everything I want to be a role model.

Haile Gebrselassie

#36. The cricket's gone, we only hear machines In erg and atom they exact their pay. And life is largely lived on silver screens.

David McCord

#37. White performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body were centuries of condemnation of dancing on religious grounds.

Jamake Highwater

#38. Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.

Robert Lane Greene