Top 88 Literal Quotes

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense – names of familiar figures around the house.

Glamour is a beautiful illusion – the word ‘glamour’ originally meant a literal magic spell – that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

I enjoy every climb – maybe it’s because it’s a literal dance between life and death.

I sort of took the literal term of ‘The Cleaner,’ and I started bringing janitorial items to the ring with me, so I took garbage bags and brooms and mops.

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.

When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it’s only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We’re talking about something that’s so surreal, it’s just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.

Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. Take a breath now. And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you.

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

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

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.

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

I think the most attractive people are the confident ones, regardless of their literal appearance, so I strive for that. Basically, I think you’ll always be the size your body needs to be if you only eat if you are hungry. If you never eat for any other reason, you’ll be just the right size for your body.

Part of the advantage, and part of the result of trying to be a producer and director, are the practical things, you find. It’s so advantageous to go to a place that you already have a feel for, a literal and spiritual familiarity.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress – not to seek their approval; to inform.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

As I got older, I had more experience with borders. Some literal – living in the dramatically blue misty mountains on the line between North Carolina and Tennessee, and living in California – home to expats, transplants, and refugees from both sides of innumerable borders.

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

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.

I don’t know anybody that has a teenage son or daughter who at some point hasn’t been like, ‘God, I hate them’ just under their breath. It’s not meant to be literal. It’s funny.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it’s not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It’s all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

I try not to be overly literal. When I’m writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it’s so evocative. You think it’s a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.

When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consultants very gradually but inevitably became literal reactionaries.

I’ve always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That’s true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.

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

The month of Ramadan is the world’s most widespread fast and yet its teachings are minimised, neglected and even betrayed (through literal application of rules that overlooks their ultimate objective).

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.

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.

Our music would probably be a really dark ocean, so you may not know where you are. It’s not so literal. It’s like a David Lynch movie.

You know it’s my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There’s another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier… Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.

The court today, just as in 1776, is deaf to the voices of the people and their repeated entreaties: they have become arrogant, contemptuous, highhanded, and literal despots.

I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings… At a certain point, I decided I didn’t want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.

It’s great to watch people come up and help mold their careers. I really took it literal when Kanye said, ‘Listen to the kids, bruh.’ That really means something.

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.

Mapping, both literal and metaphorical, has always been about our quest for knowing.

If there is anyone who should not be trusted with regard to intelligence, it is Donald Trump, both in the literal sense and with regard to our intelligence services. He shouldn’t have access to these briefings.

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

Politics has become very corporate. There’s a whole farm system for the teams. There’s decisions made at the top. There’s a lot of literal corporate involvement, PAC money involved in selecting and backing candidates.

There was a period of time during the ‘Jagged Little Pill’ era where I don’t think I laughed for about two years. It was a survival mode, you know. It was an intense, constant, chronic over-stimulation and invasion of energetic and physical literal space.

Watch the History Channel if you want it literal and historically perfect.

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress – just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.

I titled the book ‘Homo Deus’ because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities – in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.

Movies are too literal.

I do not consider myself a literal genius.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn’t a literal explanation. They’re not riddles for the listener to solve.

I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don’t believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.

If I see a fashion show with literal influences, it doesn’t make me think any more. It doesn’t make me dream.

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

Being a full-time musician back before I had my son, it was sort of too much ‘me’ all the time. I felt like a bit of a narcissist, always doing just my art – even though I feel like artists are doing a service as well. I needed something a little more literal, instead of writing music and hoping people enjoyed it.