Quotes About Interpretation

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.

This is the paradoxical responsibility of the reader: to replenish the strangeness of the novel by making connections with the familiar.

Because we are all human and there by share a neurological apparatus of vision which we can take, save for cases of obvious malfunction, as behaving in the same way for everyone, there seems no reason to doubt that what a painter understands by, say, a hand is exactly what everyone understands by it. Yet how can we be sure that visual experience is universally similar? What guarantees the guarantee?

if someone ever asks you, "Do you believe in evolution?" you should ask that person, "What do you mean by evolution? Do you mean micro- or macroevolution?" Microevolution has been observed; but it cannot be used as evidence for macroevolution, which has never been observed.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word "coincidence" exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

outlining how certain fans of 'NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ.

And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment).

I attempted to make a more academic argument about how the Limp Bizkit song "Nookie" was misogynist for suggesting that the protagonist's ex-girlfriend should inject a cookie into her vagina (or maybe that she should somehow fold her vagina into her rectum — the specific lyrics have never been clear).

songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real.

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the "journey" of a particular "hero," in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

It is crazy," said the nervous little man I'd followed up the street. "That's the only thing you learn in law school that's useful: Laws are crazy on purpose. Everything is negotiable. If you make a law complicated enough, you can apply it any way you want. You just need to make sure it's so complicated that no normal person can understand it, unless they went to law school.

The possibility of parents and children sharing the same cultural interests has increased dramatically over the past twenty-five years; today, the central bifurcation is how that communal culture is accessed and interpreted and experienced.

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

In other words, people who don't know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility. But we question this far less when the information comes from the past. It's so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.

A book become popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For the true obsessive, whatever an author doesn't explicitly explain ends up becoming everything that matters most (and since it's inevitably the obsessives who keep art alive, they make the rules).

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

Over time,[*] the Google algorithm created something that had never previously existed: a consensus about the shared understanding of everything.

A book becomes popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.