“ 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. ”
- Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire- Copy
- 165
“ 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. ”
- Karl Marx- Copy
- 1.3K
“ It is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. ”
- Brian Friel- Copy
- 2.2K
“ In combat, life is short, nasty and brutish. The issues of national policy which brought him into war are irrelevant to the combat soldier; he is concerned with his literal life chances. ”
- Charles E. Moskos- Copy
- 1.6K
“ By starving emotions, we become humorless, rigid and stereotyped. By repressing them, we become literal, reformatory and holier-than-thou. Encouraged, they perfume life; discouraged, they poison it. ”
- Joseph Collins- Copy
- 1.2K
“ The "text" is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic. ”
- Leslie Fiedler- Copy
- 404
“ We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so little scar…Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. ”
- William James- Copy
- 1.6K
“ An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. Enchantment may be a state of rapture and ecstasy in which the soul comes to the foreground, and the literal concerns of survival and daily preoccupation at least momentarily fade into the background. ”
- Thomas Moore- Copy
- 2K
“ A painting… is just one image. It allows you to elaborate, dwell on that one picture, go off on it because no further images are forced upon you. But the motion picture is always changing. So what you have to do is create some kind of eye field, an abstract form in a literal sense that tries to emulate what the brain is perceiving, not what the eye is seeing. ”
- John Leslie- Copy
- 3.9K
“ I'm used to playing literal story lines and dealing with people's emotions. I had a story where I was put in a dungeon for four weeks. That to me is such an unlikely scenario, I had a very hard time making my imagination go there. I find myself not actually playing it… ”
- Deidre Hall- Copy
- 1.2K
“ The leaders of the Catholic Church endorsed The Exorcist - virtually promoted it as much as they could. The Cardinals of New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and the other big cities, all over the world, they endorsed it because it represents a literal depiction of the Roman ritual of exorcism which still exists in the Catholic faith… ”
- William Friedkin- Copy
- 952
“ We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death… ”
- Dame Barbara Ward- Copy
- 2K
“ 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. ”
- George Steiner- Copy
- 2.3K
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