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Literal Quotes

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Literal Quotes

“So the greatest source of happiness is other people- and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.”

PeopleIfsThinkingDoeMovingHouseCollegeSourceWallWealthyApartmentEstatesLiteralDormsSource Of HappinessMoving Up
Book:The Geography of Bliss
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“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”

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Book:Conversations with Carl Sagan
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“However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.”

TwoWarEnoughBodyHateCapableSkinsCoffeeBunchSymbolsCupsConsumersPatrioticThinkerFlagsSophisticatedCrystalsContradictoryLiteralOpen MindedCoffee CupStickerConfederateAmerican FlagConfederate Flag
Author:Sarah Vowell
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“We learn that many great thinkers were convinced that the Bible contained the Ancient Mysteries, but not in the literal words—that the words on the pages were codes, and that the Bible is comprised of heavy-handed and useless story covering up something much more important and interesting. I get the feeling that [Dan Brown] is trying to tell me something, but I am not biting, reader.”

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Author:Maureen Johnson
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“The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.”

EnoughHumanityThreeLove IsIllStatementsCrucialStakesIsolatedEmbarrassingEmbarrassmentLiteralTranscendentEcstaticFragilityReassuringThree WordsNuminous
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.”

WritingHumansMadeEnergyMemoriesHuman BeingsBonesFleshTeethPoeticLiteralAnatomy
Book:Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
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“Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.”

NeedsMindHumansLawBeliefForceSacrificeAtheismOffersLimitsWeaponsClaimsAtheistPursuitInevitableHuman LifeCourageousIronicFearfulInvestigationCultLaws Of NaturePatheticOpen MindLiteralMindlessWailingAdulationInevitable Death
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.”

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Book:The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess
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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.”

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Author:Michelle Tea
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“What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.”

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Author:John Green
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“Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while.Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal”

WantWholeFireBabyKissingTablesParisLiteral
Book:Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls
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“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.”

IfsMeanGuyWalksBehindsKnowingDoorsRejectedLiteralBumpsMaintenanceCanned Food
Book:I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman
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“The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“In my understanding of God I start with certain firm beliefs. One is that the laws of nature are not broken. We do not, of course, know all these laws yet, but I believe that such laws exist. I do not, therefore, believe in the literal truth of some miracles which are featured in the Christian Scriptures, such as the Virgin Birth or water into wine. ... God works, I believe, within natural laws, and, according to natural laws, these things happen.”

KnowsBelieveHappensChristianLawScienceCertainCoursesBeliefI BelieveUnderstandingWaterNaturalHard WorkBrokenBirthMiracleWineScriptureThings HappenFirmVirginsLaws Of NatureLiteralNatural LawFirm BeliefsVirgin Birth
Author:Nevill Francis Mott
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“The sceptic ultimately undermines democracy (1) because he can see no significance in death and such things of a literal equality; (2) because he introduces different first principles, making debate impossible: and debate is the life of democracy; (3) because the fading of the images of sacred persons leaves a man too prone to be a respecter of earthly persons; (4) because there will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights.”

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Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”

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Book:In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
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“Most of us would be upset if we were accused of being "silly." But the word "silly" comes from the old English word "selig," and its literal definition is "to be blessed, happy, healthy and prosperous."”

IfsWould BeHappinessHealingHealthyBlessedDefinitionsMeaningfulSillyUpsetTeensAccusedProsperousLiteralBeing BlessedBeing SillyOld EnglishEnglish Words
Book:Over the Top: Moving from Survival to Stability, from Stability to Success, from Success to Significance
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“The word mantra comes from two Sanskrit words man, ("to think") and tra ("tool'). So the literal translation is "a tool of thought." And that's how mantras are used in Buddhist and Hindu practices, as tools that clear your mind of distractions. Because when you focus on repeating that mantra over and over again, soon the noise will die down and all you will hear is your inner voice.”

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Author:Russell Simmons
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“With respect to the words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

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Author:James Madison
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“And Christ was born into the world as the literal Son of this Holy Being; he was born in the same personal, real, and literal sense that any mortal son is born to a mortal father. There is nothing figurative about his paternity; he was begotten, conceived and born in the normal and natural course of events, for he is the Son of God, and that designation means what it says.”

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Author:Bruce R. McConkie
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“As far as this life is concerned, [Jesus] was born of Mary and of Elohim; he came here as an offspring of that Holy Man who is literally our Father in heaven. He was born in mortality in the literal and full sense as the Son of God. He is the Son of his father in the same sense that all morals are the sons and daughters of their fathers.”

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Author:Bruce R. McConkie
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“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaims that Jesus Christ is the Son of God in the most literal sense. The body in which He performed His mission in the flesh was sired by that some Holy Being we worship as God, our Eternal Father. Jesus was not the son of Joseph, nor was He begotten by the Holy Ghost.”

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Book:Come unto Christ
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