Quotes About Interpretation

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.

A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.

historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is.

you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.

There are no truths. Only stories.

There are no truths, Coyote," I says. "Only stories.

History is the stories we tell about the past.

The thinkers and works of the past are studied here not as dated museum pieces or objects of antiquarian curiosity; they are confronted as powerful voices that challenge us to join in searching debates. The point is not to learn about these thinkers and texts, but from them.

I have only recorded what everyone is saying (though they may not know they are saying it), and sometimes what they have seen (though they may not know they have seen it).

The voice you hear when you read to yourself is the clearest voice: you speak it speaking to you.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices. There was no place in such a scheme for orders, styles, sophistication, taste. ("The Asian Shore")

Unable to see their own biases, most people will simply drive each other crazy arguing rather than accept answers that contradict what they already think about the subject. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, "almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence."15

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our "reality tunnel.

How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer's days!

Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality.

Si yo fuera solipsista, probablemente no habría escrito este libro, pues no creería que hubiese alguien más que lo leyera.

What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bible babble. Need we anie of your Greek, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrage, when we have the word of God in English?

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.