Literals, just by themselves, are one of the simplest forms of expressions. The value of an expression containing a single literal is the value of the literal itself. In other words, it would be correct to say that when Python evaluates the expression 42, it produces the value of 42. It might seem redundant or even a little silly to you at this point, but this sort of thinking is very common in computer science. We start from something that seems trivially true and build up complexity from there.