Quotes About Interpretation

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.

3)"One man's weed is another man's flower." (115).

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

read Plato or Shakespeare or Dante as if we found their books in the street and had no idea who they were. I

My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.

Pure painting or the art of drawing whose point of departure is based on purely formal criteria is,in my opinion,pass. I do not reject it if other artists make attempts,but as far as I am concerned,this is what I believe. if I do not place a text next to my drawings,I consider the work on such programmes to be futile.

It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them.

The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.

Es hört doch jeder nur, was er versteht.

One cannot escape from the world with greater certainty than through art, and one cannot relate to it with greater certainty than through art.

In Israel, we read from right to left. [To Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, who had written her that he considers himself 'an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third']

This world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.

Historians must, of course, present both sides of the argument, but they do not have to be neutral. I hope that I have treated the facts, as far as they can be determined with accuracy, as sacred, but I cannot hide my conviction

That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen.

The concern of the scholar is primarily with what the text meant; the concern of the layperson is usually with what it means. The believing scholar insists that we must have both. Reading the Bible with an eye only to its meaning for us can lead to a great deal of nonsense as well as to every imaginable kind of error—because it lacks controls. Fortunately, most believers are blessed with at least a measure of that most important of all hermeneutical skills—common sense.

Interpretation that aims at, or thrives on, uniqueness can usually be attributed to pride (an attempt to "outclever" the rest of the world), a false understanding of spirituality (wherein the Bible is full of deeply buried truths waiting to be mined by the spiritually sensitive person with special insight), or vested interests (the need to support a theological bias, especially in dealing with texts that seem to go against that bias).

1. Old Testament narratives are not allegories or stories filled with hidden meanings

Everyone has a theology [that is, some rudimentary view of God and the world on the basis of which they live]; the question is not whether you have a theology—you do—but whether you have a good one.

It's not what happens to people on the page; it's about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind.

Our feelings depend mainly on our interpretation of what is happening to us and around us—our attitudes. It is not so much what occurs, but how we define events and respond that determines how we feel. The thing that characterizes those who struggle emotionally is that they have lost, or believe they have lost, their ability to choose those behaviors that will make them happy.

The stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives, are under constant revision. The slender threads of causality are rewoven and reinterpreted as we attempt to explain to ourselves and others how we became the people we are.

The key question I learned to ask myself when I read was, "What is the author trying to say?