Literal Quotes - Page 8

• Among the Mormons, things temporal have always been important along with things eternal, for salvation in this world and the next is seen as one and the same continuing process of endless growth. Building Zion, a literal Kingdom of God on earth, has therefore meant an identity of religious and economic values: in the daily affairs of the Kingdom, Latter-day Saint scriptures call for unity, welfare, and economic independence.

  Leonard J. Arrington

  Religious, Economic Value, Zion

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• Conversations...begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I'm using the word 'conversation' not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Art, Stress, Ideas

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• As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you're a kid again, poking around in your parents' closet, only this time there's no chance of getting in trouble, so you don't have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.

  Roz Chast

  Memories, Kids, Dust

  "The Dinner Diaries" by Roz Chast, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 2010.

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• Moses is the keystone to every man's ethical code. He was the first man of record in history to conceive of the law as separate from the will of a ruler, to choose whether a man should live by grace of law, or law by grace of man. In a literal sense Moses lives at every council table today.

  Charlton Heston

  Men, Law, Grace

  "Moses Film Role Awes Portrayer". "Los Angeles Times" Newspaper, October 28, 1956.

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• It seems to me that it was well said by Madama Serenissima, and insisted on by your reverence, that the Holy Scripture cannot err, and that the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. But I should have in your place added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways; and one error in particular would be most grave and most frequent, if we always stopped short at the literal signification of the words.

  Galileo Galilei

  Errors, Should Have, Would Be

  Letter to Benedetto Castelli, 1613.

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• 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

  Country, Book, Doubt

  Charles Darwin “Charles Darwin: An Anthology”, Transaction Publishers

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• I think that hell essentially is separation from God forever. And that is the worst hell that I can think of. But I think people have a hard time believing God is going to allow people to burn in literal fire forever. I think the fire that is mentioned in the Bible is a burning thirst for God that can never be quenched.

  Billy Graham

  Believe, Hard Times, Thinking

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• 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

  Math, Numbers, Law

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• ...people like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped.

  Michelle Tea

  People, Flippant, Phrases

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• I enjoy every climb - maybe it's because it's a literal dance between life and death.

  Alain Robert

  Life And Death, Enjoy, Climbs

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

  John Thorn

  Pain, Home, Greek

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• Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by 'conviviality,' by 'living together' in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. 'True desires' - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation.

  Hakim Bey

  Spiritual, Self, Psychics

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• The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

  Thomas Cahill

  World, Shapes, Poet

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, p.129, Anchor

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• Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

  Josef Albers

  Art, Expression, Done

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• The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Numbers, Vivid

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• 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

  Writing, Events, Stories

  "Mark Mothersbaugh Revisits His Literary Roots". Interview with Danielle Wiener-Bronner, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 09, 2012.

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• All maps are distorted, they are not literal fact.

  Paula Scher

  Maps, Facts

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• Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification

  Robert Smithson

  Artist, Language, Metaphorical

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.61, Univ of California Press

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• To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

  Richard Mabey

  Roots, Tree, Way

  Richard Mabey (2013). “The Ash and The Beech: The Drama of Woodland Change”, p.6, Random House

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• When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.

  J. J. Abrams

  Real, Spectacular, Hypothetical

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Zero, Past, Rejection

  Rosalind E. Krauss (1986). “The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths”, p.157, MIT Press

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• Enthusiasm is the energy and force that builds literal momentum of the human soul and mind.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Motivational, Soul, Mind

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• 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

  Animal, Political, Politics

  Karl Marx (1973). “Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy”, Vintage Books USA

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• I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.

  Anne Lamott

  Understanding, Opinion, Theological

  "'Like a puppy in a Christmas stocking'". Interview With Susan Olasky, world.wng.org. September 20, 2003.

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• A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

  Stephen King

  Children, Growing Up, Eye

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