Literal Quotes

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.

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

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

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

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.

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.

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 a middle-aged man says in a moment of weariness that he is half dead, he is telling the literal truth.

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.

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

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.

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

The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

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.

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

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.

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Movies are too literal.

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.

If it's just screaming - and I know this sounds so ridiculous - that gets old. But sometimes when there's literal chaos, it's like being in a war zone, and that's kind of exciting. You're just running through the crowd of people chasing after you and no one knows what's going on.

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.