Quotes About Literal

And what if it were only a story?" said Mrs. May quickly, "so long as it was a good story? Keep your sense of wonder, child, and don't be so literal. Anything we haven't experienced for ourselves sounds like a story. All we can ever do is sift the evidence.

I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them.

The destruction of psychological Truth by literal truth is the continual drama of human life.

One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsage to make a simple and direct statement. So what is one to do? The dilema needs a whole volume to itself.

Literal interpretation without context is not only dangerous but contrary to what the Bible teaches.

What is truth?" I said. "Is it the shallow assurance that something literally took place, or is it about something far deeper, something that is profoundly true— on all levels? Not just the literal one. It's like poetry.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them.

this was another—and to some quite the ultimate—example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal, definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.

We have also seen that it is easy to mistake literary representation (the use of vivid imagery to denote space-time reality and connote its theological significance) for metaphysical representation (whereby a 'spiritual' or 'transcendent' being is the heavenly counterpart of an earthly reality); and that in this confusion it is all too easy to imagine that language which, in a culture other than our own, would be recognized as highly figurative, is flatly literal.

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.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

A literal is syntax that allows you to define a reference value without explicitly creating an object, using the new operator and the object's constructor.

Darkness is clever, insidious, and patient. It wants to win. And it wins by snuffing out the light. It's so literal that you can't stand it.

The trick is to cultivate "double vision" … A sense of metaphor, of translation - of two worlds interpenetrating - must be maintained. But this is also the essential movement of the imagination. We see through the literal world to the shape-shifting Otherworld behind.

When we speak of God as a person, we ought to be conscious of the fact that we use an allegory which, if it were taken literally, can only belittle him.

Religious language, like all language, can also so easily be used as an instrument of power by which some people seek to control other people. That's an abiding danger every time we open our mouth and speak, contemporary philosophers tell us, so we have to be aware of it and be on guard against it. Our guard goes down and the temptation to turn religious language into power language goes up when we take that language in a too literal, or too precise, or univocal sense.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship.