Tobuscus Literal Quotes

Whenever you find a preacher who takes the Bible allegorically and figuratively ... that preacher is preaching an allegorical gospel which is no gospel. I thank God for a literal Christ, for a literal salvation. There is literal sorrow, literal death, literal Hell, and, thank God, there is a literal Heaven. ~ J. Frank Norris

All of my songs are about me and my experiences. They're very literal. ~ Lily Allen

All maps are distorted, they are not literal fact. ~ Paula Scher

Film in many ways is very literal. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

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

I've always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal. ~ Portia Doubleday

When I'm with you I feel like...That's just it. I feel. in a very literal sense, you drive me crazy. In a very literal sense, you make my heart beat faster. In a very literal sense, Ricky...you take my breath away. ~ Jacqueline Francis - The Journal

Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin. ~ Susanna Moore

Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus. ~ John Green

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

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative. ~ Peter Morgan

Movies are too literal. ~ E.L. Doctorow

I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. And it was way to literal for me. ~ Mitch Hedberg

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

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

A literal interpretation of the Gita lands one in a sea of contradictions. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. ~ John Searle

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

Most times when people pitch you as being perfect for a part ... they don't look at you as an actor who can transform. A lot of people are so literal. ~ Catherine Keener

I tend to be kind of literal about translation. I think it's important to present the writer as closely as possible. ~ Ann Goldstein

My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself. ~ Uta Barth

Most men I know rely on women to do all the literal dirty work. ~ Elizabeth Banks

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical. ~ Mark Mothersbaugh

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them. ~ John Shelby Spong

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. ~ Theodor Adorno

What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom. ~ Naomi Klein

You've got to get as literal as you can get to convince people sometimes that you can do something. ~ Gillian Jacobs

A verse from the Veda says, 'What you see, you become.' In other words, just the experience of perceiving the world makes you what you are. This is a quite literal statement. ~ Deepak Chopra

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us. ~ Anselm Kiefer

A complete fast is a complete and literal denial of self. It is the truest prayer. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Nowadays we are fond of literal translations ... That would have seemed a crime to translators in ages past ... They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I tell you, Heaven is a real, literal, physical place, a city as material, as physical, as literal as Chicago or London or New York or Tokyo. ~ John R. Rice

Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world. ~ Robert Hughes

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

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

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space. ~ Garry Winogrand

The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium. ~ Joseph Bologna

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family. ~ John Thorn

Studios are used to have an investment in you, an actual, literal investment in an actor. You paid them some money, you had a contract with them and you were almost like a commodity. ~ Ben Affleck

God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it's experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense "makes it good." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

[A] strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: human life is one and all men are members of one another. And this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious experience. ~ Howard Thurman

If the fire of hell is not literal, it is worse than actual fire, and if the gates of the Celestial City are not actual gold, they are far finer. ~ Vance Havner

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

Language is power, in ways more literal than most people think. When we speak, we exercise the power of language to transform reality. Why don't more of us realize the connection between language and power? ~ Julia Penelope

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

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 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

Compulsion in the literal Sense is maliciously misrepresented, by supposing it authorizes Violences committed against the Truth. The Answer to this; by which it is prov'd, that the literal Sense does in reality authorize the stirring up Persecutions against the Cause of Truth, and that an erroneous Conscience has the same Rights as an enlighten'd Conscience. ~ Pierre Bayle

Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy. ~ Henry David Thoreau

He said, Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But both are equally true. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

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

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. ~ John Dominic Crossan

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

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

There was our house in New Orleans. Two blocks in front of us were these beautiful mansions and two blocks behind us were the ghetto, projects, and that's where I had to go to school, but I would always pattern my life looking forward. It was almost literal. ~ Tyler Perry

Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different. ~ Chace Crawford

Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence ... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

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

A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless. ~ Marguerite Duras

There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on. ~ Cornel West

In short, Strict Father morality requires perfect, precise, literal communication, together with a form of behaviorism. Thus, Strict Father morality requires that four conditions on the human mind and human behavior must be met: 1. Absolute categorization: Everything is either in or out of a category. 2. Literality: All moral rules must be literal. 3. Perfect communication: The hearer receives exactly the same meaning as the speaker intends to communicate. 4. Folk behaviorism: According to human nature, people normally act effectively to get rewards and avoid punishments. Cognitive ~ George Lakoff

turn into a literal one. ~ Lemony Snicket

I admire someone who in the literal sense can say, 'If it is broken, I can fix it. If it's lost I can find it. IF you fall, I can catch you.' because if you can say it in the literal sense, you can mean it in the figurative sense. The littlest things can change the world. A smile can save someone's life, and a hand freely given when you have nothing to give other than yourself, can mean the world to someone else ~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Don't forget I could make you play a literal game of 'stop hitting yourself,'" Aegis said. ~ Terry Bolryder

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name. ~ Michel De Certeau

I've lived the literal meaning of the "land of the free" and "home of the brave." It's not corny for me. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my chest. Even at a ball game, when someone talks during the anthem or doesn't take off his hat, it pisses me off. I'm not one to be quiet about it, either. ~ Chris Kyle

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this. ~ Dervla Murphy

A glove is a very literal looking hand puppet. ~ Demetri Martin

Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. ~ David Foster Wallace

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me. ~ Sam Abell

Poets ... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts. ~ Archibald MacLeish

And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. ~ C.S. Lewis

Anything" is a funny little word, overused and rarely literal.
"Anything" never covers the whole gamut of existence. ~ Christina Dalcher

A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I'm not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma. ~ Jim Butcher

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth. ~ Stephen Fry

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. ~ Ayn Rand

Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense. ~ Ken Liu

Theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Issac should not be taken as literal fact, and the appropriate response is two-fold. First, many, many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Secondly, how should we take the story? As an alagory? Then an alagory for what? Surely nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? Then what kind of lesson could be derived from this appalling story? ~ Richard Dawkins

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

We all paint on a face to show the world," Nicholas replies philosophically. "For some of us, that's quite literal. ~ L. H. Cosway

You and I must realize that the English language is filled with words that, in addition to their literal meanings, convey distinct emotional intensity. For example, if you develop a habit of saying you 'hate' things - you 'hate' your hair; you 'hate' your job; you 'hate' having to do something - do you think this raises the intensity of your negative emotional states more than if you use a phrase like 'I prefer something else'? ~ Tony Robbins

Apathy is just lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. ~ Anonymous

'Fantasy' is one of the fewer tracks where it's more literal than most of our things, but at the same time it's totally open-ended. Clearly it's a song about things not really appearing as you want them to, or things either getting what you want and not being satisfied with it because it wasn't how you hoped it would be, or thinking you want something and not getting it and the realisation of that. ~ Lizzy Plapinger

My mother always said that I would come to a bad end but I never thought she meant this - writing allegory in literal times. ~ Peter Murphy

Best friends are literal and figurative life savers that we should thank as often as possible for rescuing us from ourselves. ~ Joshunda Sanders

Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it. To put it another way, the statement the image makes - not just what it show you, but the mood, moral evaluation and casual connections it suggest - is built up from those details. A proper 'reading' of a photograph sees and responds to them consciously. ~ Howard S. Becker

Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them. ~ Mason Cooley

I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on. ~ Josephine Baker

"All men are born equal and free" is not Nature's law in the literal sense. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

When the only rule is there are no rules becomes literal, we'll all become illiterate and unable to offend one another at all. ~ Brian Spellman

Because of their excessive commitment to a literal Bible, fundamentalist Christians have fallen into the trap of biblioltry. ~ Mel White

When I said I'd follow you to hell and back, I wasn't trying to be literal, princess. ~ Julie Kagawa

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

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.
[The Autumnal] ~ John Donne