Literal Quotes - Page 12

• They used to call the devil the father of lies. But for someone whose sin is meant to be pride, you'd think that lying would leave something of a sour taste. So my theory is that when the devil wants to get something out of you, he doesn't lie at all. He tells you the exact, literal truth. And he lets you find your own way to hell.

  Mike Carey

  Lying, Father, Pride

  "Lucifer" by Mike Carey, Issue 10, "Children and Monsters", Part 1, 1999-2006.

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• 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

  World, Stage, Stuck

  "Seeing Things Straight". Interview by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, www.guernicamag.com. April 15, 2006.

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• When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas - such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

  Ken Ham

  Book, Reading, School

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• You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.

  Michael Ian Black

  Games, Architecture, Cases

  "Michael Ian Black on the many versions of 'himself'". Interview with Erik Adams, tv.avclub.com. October 22, 2013.

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• A glove is a very literal looking hand puppet.

  Demetri Martin

  Hands, Gloves, Puppets

  Twitter post from Dec 10, 2012

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• We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

  Ishmael

  War, World, Way

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• 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

  Taken, Trying, Littles

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• The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

  Dan Brown

  Jesus, Buddhist, Islamic

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• Through humility, soul-searching, and prayerful contemplation we have gained a new understanding of certain dogmas. The church no longer believes in a literal hell where people suffer. This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God. God is not a judge but a friend and a lover of humanity. God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace. Like the fable of Adam and Eve, we see hell as a literary device. Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God.

  Unknown

  Believe, Humility, Judging

  "Doomed to Hell Fire and Damn-the-Nation" by Joanna Perry-Folino, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 30, 2013.

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• The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I've always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, 'OK, that's me.'

  Michael Stipe

  Kids, Ethics, Punk

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• Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.

  Frank Stella

  Simple, Impact, Curves

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• My work makes people understand things in a visual way that I could never understand in a literal way - like the way you deal with and break down problems, and don't come up with answers, but [find] a pathway that becomes clearer.

  Ali Banisadr

  People, Way, Answers

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naïveté?

  John Shelby Spong

  Book, Believe, People

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• The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

  Northrop Frye

  Poetic, Primaries

  Northrop Frye, Alvin A. Lee (2006). “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature”, p.79, University of Toronto Press

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• Philo of Alexandria introduced in the first century what has been described as the 'Hellenizing of the Old Testament,' or the allegorical method of exegesis. By this, as Erdmann observes, the Bible narrative was found to contain a deeper, and particularly an allegorical interpretation, in addition to its literal interpretation; this was not conscious disingenuousness but a natural mode of amalgamating the Greek philosophic with the Hebraic doctrines.

  Philo

  Greek, Alexandria, Firsts

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• 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

  Art, Real, Green

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.

  Al Pacino

  Earth, Stage, Magnet

  "New Again: Al Pacino". Interview with Colleen Kelsey and Julian Schnabel, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 25, 2012.

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• I have always been quite good at falling in love, but I don't pretend to know anything about literal happily ever afters. 

  Jennifer Harrison

  Falling In Love, Ever After, Knows

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• In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

  Theresa Breslin

  Emotional, Order, Stories

  "Theresa Breslin: bringing the past to life". Interview with Michelle Pauli, www.theguardian.com. September 2, 2010.

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• The highest art of professional management requires the literal ability to 'smell' a 'real fact' from all others.

  Harold Geneen

  Art, Real, Smell

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• The Word of truth teaches in the clearest and most positive terms that all of the dead will be raised. No doctrine of the faith rests upon a more literal and emphatic body of Scripture authority than this, nor is any more vital to Christianity.

  C. I. Scofield

  Doctrine, Body, Scripture

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• In its natural state, the child tells the literal truth because it is too naive to think of anything else. Blurting out the complete truth is considered adorable in the young, right smack up to the moment that the child says, 'Mommy, is this the fat lady you can't stand?

  Judith Martin

  Children, Honesty, Thinking

  Judith Martin (2002). “Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children”, p.323, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Laughter, Real, Humor

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• We know that the gifts which men have do not come from the schools. If a man is a plain, literal, factual man, you can make a great deal more of him in his own line by education than without education, just as you can make a great deal more of a potato if you cultivate it than if you do not; but no cultivation in this world will ever make an apple out of a potato.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Education, School, Men

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal truths”, p.114

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• We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.

  A.J. Ayer

  Reality, Limits, Significance

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