Literal Quotes - Page 3

• Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

  Bill Nye

  Running, Memories, Numbers

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• The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Enemy, Doctrine, Interpretation

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1972). “Selected Essays on Atheism”, Ayer Company Pub

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• Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Powerful, Struggle, Biblical

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.

  Joseph Bologna

  Bologna, Film, Stage

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• I think we, especially in American culture, are so afraid to talk about death. And I'm not talking about literal death. I'm talking about shedding skin. I'm talking about rebirth, ultimately, and how we continue to change as human beings and continue to grow. There's that great Henry Miller quote, "All growth is a leap in the dark."

  Amber Tamblyn

  Dark, Thinking, Talking

  "Amber Tamblyn: 'I get rejected for a living'". Interview with Rachel Matlow, www.salon.com. August 30, 2015.

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• When our intellect has shaken off its many opinions about created things, then the inner principle of truth appears clearly to it, providing it with a foundation of real knowledge and removing its former preconceptions as though removing scales from eyes, as happened in the case of St. Paul (cf. Acts 9:18). For an understanding of Scripture that does not go beyond the literal meaning, and a view of the sensible world that relies exclusively on sense perception, are indeed scales, blinding the soul's visionary faculty and preventing access to the pure Logos of truth.

  Maximus the Confessor

  Christian, Real, Eye

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• The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Reflection, Population, Records

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• Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

  Voltaire

  Giving, Letters, Woe

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• Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

  Lauren Slater

  Doe, Fiction, Half

  Lauren Slater (2000). “Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir”, Random House Incorporated

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• 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

  Light, Years, Film

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. August 22, 2012.

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• When a middle-aged man says in a moment of weariness that he is half dead, he is telling the literal truth.

  Elmer Davis

  Men, Half, Telling The Truth

  On not being Dead, as Reported

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• 

  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

  Ocean, Men, Sea

  Speech by Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas on the occasion of the signing of the Belém Statement, Lisbon, europa.eu. July 13, 2017.

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• The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Struggle, Ironic, Mind

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• We've always had the blame-America crowd. We've always had the hate-America crowd. But we've now had at least two generations of education where this has been indoctrinated into the young skulls full of mush of young people. They've heard how horrible America was back in the days of slavery. They've heard how horrible America treated women. They've heard how horrible every minority group was treated. They've heard how mean-spirited the founders were. They've heard all kinds of literal lies.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Lying, Hate, Mean

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

  Michael Pollan

  America, Income, Citizens

  Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.48, Penguin

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• Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

  Jon Meacham

  Inspiration, Independent, Assessment

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• So the greatest source of happiness is other people- and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.

  Eric Weiner

  Wall, Moving, College

  Eric Weiner (2014). “The Geography of Bliss”, p.151, Random House

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• Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

  China Mieville

  Squids, Monsters, Giants

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• However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.

  Sarah Vowell

  Hate, War, Coffee

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• 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

  Inspirational, Life, Truth

  Carl Sagan, Tom Head (2006). “Conversations with Carl Sagan”, p.145, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I do not consider myself a literal genius.

  Lil Wayne

  Genius

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• I think people's perception of a rich girl is literal, but metaphorically I embrace it as being rich in love, spirit, joy and religion. So it's not about money.

  Angie Stone

  Girl, Thinking, People

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• I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith.

  Francis Collins

  Christian, Believe, Rising

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• Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

  Grant Morrison

  Thinking, Medicine, Groups

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• I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.

  Edward Gorey

  Today, Intention

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