Quotes About Interpretation

Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, "The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.

In opening that essay, she wrote, "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical…." Later in the essay, she adds, "Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactive, stifling. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish.

Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see.

I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. (pg. 174)

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence

Literature is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.

People try to make names for things they don't understand

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword. MATTHEW 10:34

practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named).

No one speaks for God - not even the prophets (who speak about God)

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.

Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His

There are two distinct methods of interpreting the Quran. The first, tafsir, is primarily concerned with elucidating the literal meaning of the text, while the second, ta'wil, is more concerned with the hidden, esoteric meaning of the Quran.

The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion

It is simply up to the individual to decide what "the One" is: how it should be defined, and how it should be experienced

The fact is that for fourteen centuries, the science of Quranic commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men. And

Cómo podía ser que nadie comprendiera? se había preguntado Tardewski. ¿O sólo leemos lo que ya hemos leído, una y otra vez, para buscar en las palabras lo que sabemos que está en ellas, sin que sorpresa alguna pueda variar el sentido?

When a style becomes opaque, when you look at it rather than looking through it, the schoolmarmly bell of reproach begins to ring.

Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.