Literal Quotes - Page 5

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

  Gillian Jacobs

  People, Sometimes, Convince

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• Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express cultural conflict or even social protest.

  Kim Chernin

  Country, May, Able

  Kim Chernin (1982). “The obsession: reflections on the tyranny of slenderness”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• 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

  Moving, Epic, Past

  Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.39, The Overlook Press

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• 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

  Children, Book, Reading

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• 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

  Exercise, Thinking, Reality

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• 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

  Attitude, Artist, Odds

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• I do think you can see, throughout American history, this temptation, and it's both a liberal and a conservative temptation, to take a healthy patriotism a little too far. For liberals the temptation is to say the purpose of politics is to straightforwardly bring the kingdom of God to Earth. For conservatives, I talk about Glenn Beck, the temptation is more apocalyptic and messianic, it's the temptation to say we did have a covenant with God, a literal covenant beginning with the Founding, and we are, like Israel in the Old Testament, falling away from it.

  Ross Douthat

  Fall, Thinking, Israel

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• 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

  Purpose, Machines, Forks

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• The devil, as a master of deceit, does everything he can to keep people from believing in the existence of a hell; but hell is a literal state of existence that will be the plight of all those who reject the Lord Jesus Christ.

  Tim LaHaye

  Jesus, Believe, People

  Tim LaHaye (2010). “Revelation Unveiled”, p.418, Zondervan

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• 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

  New York, Real, Cities

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• Faith is from within; it is the outbreaking of human spontaneity; it is force of soul, grandeur of sentiment, magnanimity, generosity, courage. Its formulas are naturally unintelligible in their literal tenor; for, otherwise, they would represent that which is scientifically known, and would not be the mere provisional clothing of that which is not objectively given, but subjectively projected from the inmost depth of the soul.

  William Batchelder Greene

  Generosity, Soul, Depth

  William Batchelder Greene (1871). “The Blazing Star”, p.6

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• In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

  John Searle

  Mean, Expression, Utterance

  "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language". Book by John Searle, 1969.

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• I have grounded my preaching upon the literal word; he that pleases may follow me; he that will not may stay.

  Martin Luther

  May, Follow Me, Preaching

  Martin Luther (2012). “The Table Talk of Martin Luther”, p.4, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  Russia, Roots, Anxiety

  Ayn Rand (1984). “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, p.71, Penguin

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• Departure from the literal aspect, rather than mechanical exactness, is the code of the true artist. However, departures are the result of studied intent rather than inability.

  Edgar Alwin Payne

  Artist, Inability, Departure

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• A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

  Francis Crick

  Believe, Age, Records

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• Our sacred contract is not a literal document. That's the first thing to understand. We could think of our sacred contract as a spiritual document that our soul recognizes.

  Caroline Myss

  Spiritual, Thinking, Soul

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• Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied.

  Steven Pinker

  Agency, Space, Research

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.355, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it. I love the parts I love so much, but I find a lot of it just appalling. When a right-wing person quotes a passage in order to attack and stigmatize another person--or group of people--I just roll my eyes.

  Anne Lamott

  Christian, Believe, Eye

  "Interview with Anne Lamott, Author of Help, Thanks, Wow". Interview with Jana Llewellyn, www.friendsjournal.org. January 30, 2013.

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• 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

  Spiritual, Spring, Self

  Marianne Williamson (1994). “Illuminata: A Return to Prayer”, Riverhead Trade (Paperbacks)

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• It is evident, indeed, that such a doctrine, taken by itself in a literal manner, had no future. The world, in continuing to exist, caused it to crumble. One generation of man at the most was the limit of its endurance. The faith of the first Christian generation is intelligible, but the faith of the second generation is no longer so. After the death of John, or of the last survivor, whoever he might be, of the group which had seen the master, the word of Jesus was convicted of falsehood.

  Ernest Renan

  Christian, Jesus, Taken

  Ernest Renan (2015). “The Life of Jesus: Works of Renan”, 谷月社

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• The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Biblical, Order, Years

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• When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature.

  Clarence Darrow

  Book, Teaching, Men

  "Why I Am an Agnostic: Including Expressions of Faith from a Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew". Book by Clarence Darrow, 1929.

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• 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

  Reality, Rights, Atheism

  Pierre Bayle, John Kilcullen, Chandran Kukathas (2005). “A philosophical commentary on these words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23: "Compel them to come in, that My house may be full"”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• I think it is just a matter of time before we have literal ghosts in the machine so you can create an alter ego of yourself that learns from your social experiences and extends a life even if you're no longer in the game or you are no longer alive.

  Paul Saffo

  Thinking, Games, Ego

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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