Top 458 Literal Quotes & Sayings - Page 3
Explore popular Literal quotes.
Last updated on April 15, 2025.
My cat does this thing where he's so happy to see me that he repeatedly smashes his face into my face and purrs like a literal pig.
Sci fi allowed us to be more true to the western than maybe even doing a literal western.
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.
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.
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.
There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.
Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.
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.
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.
Men aren't really complicated. They are very simple, literal creatures. They usually mean what they say. And we spend hours trying to analyze what they've said, when really it's obvious.
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.
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.
Working for Disney for the last eight and a half years, people come and go - production staff and actors. I stepped onto the sound stage and it was a literal time warp.
The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.
Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.
I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.
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.
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.
The Green New Deal would usher the entire country into a literal energy dark age, and California-style blackouts would become routine nationwide.
There is a straight-forward definition for 'Independent Filmmaking'. The term references a group of films that are financed by money that comes from outside the studio system. In a literal sense that is what it means.
I did have a literal shed of fan mail once. It was literally filled with, like, 25 of those giant mail cartons.
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.
When it comes to literal nourishment, the food we eat, life begets life.
Painting is the chance to create a different space, or different way of picturing a literal stream of images.
I have grounded my preaching upon the literal word; he that pleases may follow me; he that will not may stay.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.
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.
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.
In my daily life, I tend to be very literal and unsuperstitious. But music gives me an outlet to be very emotional.
I took my fear to literal heights and went skydiving over a year ago. It was in that moment, gazing over the precipice of the plane, when I realized what scared me the most, the unknown.
I used to be very figurative and also just kind of scared to talk about the way I felt in a literal way.
All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.
Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.
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).
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.
A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of an immaterial soul.
ISIS itself, it draws its central belief system from the Koran and from the writings of the Prophet Muhammad. That is undeniable. And it's a medieval interpretation of it. It is a literal interpretation of it.
There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other.
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.
When the code of laws is once fixed, it should be observed in the literal sense, and nothing more is left to the judge than to determine whether an action is or is not conformable to the written law.
Within the Christian tradition, fundamentalism arose in the 19th century as an effort to push back against modern' readings of the Bible that suggested everything in the text wasn't true in some literal sense.
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.
I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.
I do think my lyrics have gotten... not necessarily more poetic, but more open to interpretation; they're less literal.
Greg Berlanti is in charge of a lot of superhero shows on television. He is a literal superhero. He is absolutely brilliant.
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
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.
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.
Fast food may appear to be cheap food and, in the literal sense it often is, but that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations.
Emotionally, I was affected a lot by Rage Against the Machine, not specifically the literal intention of the words or what it was about, but the feel, the sound, those phrases that got me.
I'm more androgynous, because men are supposed to be more spatial, women more literal - I'm a tomboy.
I think I gravitate towards characters who are slight outsiders. It's fun to play a character that wants so badly to be included in the normal activities of teenage life, but lacks the literal hardware to do it.
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.
To me, the best writing points to something literal or common but is also nuanced: The moment when somebody is telling you they love you while simultaneously disappointing you. Everybody's experienced that.
Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.
The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
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.
Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.
Cross-pollination and 'contamination' is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.