Quotes About Context

The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.

There is a final resource to which I've resorted when necessary—the imagination. I have done this with judicious care, imagining for my reader only what I already know is very likely, and even then only when an informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context. Where I have been unable to explain events or motives, I have left them unexplained, out of respect for their hidden realities.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

It is obvious that the "unit"—inch—has no value by itself, but is very precious as a unit for measuring the phenomenon of length, which it perfectly represents, and that is why it was introduced.

It was just that the literal meaning itself wasn´t immediately comprehensible. That doesn´t mean it didn´t mean.

Everything means something quite other now.

Doing this in the context of this very descriptive book about the human body conveyed the message "This is just a natural part of your body.

What's descriptive isn't necessarily prescriptive.

The crucial significance of the cradle at Bethlehem lies in its place in the sequence of steps down that led the Son of God to the cross of Calvary, and we do not understand it till we see it in this context.

I've spent enough time studying languages to know that almost any phrase can have two meanings

Sometimes your greatest strength can emerge as a weakness if the context changes.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

I can see now that a concept or even a feeling makes no sense unless out of our substance we spin around it a web of references, of relationships, of values.

Politicians take something out of context to create problems.

There's nothing wrong in sporting a bikini. If the director wants to shoot you in a pool, you cannot be wearing denims or a saree - you need to be dressed accordingly to the situation.

Poor people aren't making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.

When someone drew a picture of Pope John wearing an Avis 'We try harder' button, those words no longer meant which car rental to patronize, and yet some of the overtones from its original meaning are there and make a contribution to the new situation.

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.

There will be no hard border from Dundalk to Derry in the context of it being a European border, and by that I mean customs posts every mile along the road.

I'm interested in teasing out the contemporary issues in what I'm working on, however old the piece might be, whenever I'm working on it.

It's so easy to get into the hot take on Twitter, and to be able to do it in a way that gives the proper level of context and respect.

You can't have bad things happening to characters simply for shock value; you need to provide context.

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.