Quotes About Interpretation

time belongs to everybody and everything, and nobody and nothing can lay claim to any part of it exclusively, so if you talk about the past as though there was just one version of it that everybody agrees on, you might be seen as stealing the spirit of others

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not.

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

God has left a trail of language behind a stormy path of historical activities. That language is primarily the evidence with which theology has to deal—first with Scripture, then with a long history of interpretation of Scripture called church history and tradition, and finally with the special language that emerges out of each one's own personal experience of meeting the living God

All of that happened while I was reading, just reading. I was being guided by the Spirit toward an integral sense of Scripture based on the consensus of the early Christian interpreters of sacred Scripture.

Many of Wesley's ultramodern interpreters are focused on accommodating Wesley in ways congenial to contemporary audiences. Some have entirely recast Wesley in terms of liberation theology or process theology or gender studies in a way that leaves Wesley himself only vaguely recognizable. My mission is to let him speak for himself in his own language to modern believers

The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as "glamour." In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

Istoria este distilarea zvonurilor.

The optimist says, "The glass is half full." The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty." The rationalist says, "This glass is twice as big as it needs to be." That makes it clear as glass.

The optimist says, "The glass is half full." The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty." The rationalist says, "This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraped from afar; I read the signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words.

Even so, his friend the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge would conclude that "he was at heart strongly anti-Semitic." At

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

Four times out of five the linesman gets a better view of the ball near him than the player himself.

When I was in casting, we would bring somebody in, have them read their lines, maybe give them a few pointers, and hire them, and then once they go to the set and you have a director who's directing them, that performance may not be anywhere near what you had in the audition, either good or bad.