Quotes About Interpretation

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.

Anstaunen ist auch eine Kunst. Es gehört etwas dazu, Großes als groß zu begreifen.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

She (History) too is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to grasp the importance of art one has to zero in on the artistic object rather than on the fun of the art lover.

Der Versuch, dem objektiven Gehalt Bachs zu seinem Recht zu verhelfen, indem man die subjektive Anstrengung bloß daran wendet, das Subjekt auszumerzen, überschlägt sich. Objektivität bleibt nicht als Rest der Substraktion des Subjekts zurück.

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

Con respecto a lo negativo, el hecho de que no pueda hacer otra cosa que darle la razón me obliga a un cierto grado de laconismo.

Cuando se afirma y se subraya tal cosa sin que tal diferencia resulte de las palabras mismas, y cuando en lugar de ello, las palabras se refieren precisamente a lo que niegan tales afirmaciones, surge la sospecha de que en tales palabras se esconde precisamente lo negado. Por lo tanto, no hay que creer demasiado en esas afirmaciones.

Relativism is an illusion that arises as soon as something is handled according to foreign, transcendental criteria.

Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.

Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will be confused. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. Confucius's

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.