Quotes About Interpretation

One of the most pernicious of folk-sayings is, 'I cannot believe my eyes!' Why particularly should you believe your eyes? You were given eyes to see with, not to believe with. Believe your mind, your intuition, your reason, your emotion if you like - but not your eyes unaided by any of these interpreters. Your eyes can see the mirage, the hallucination, as easily as the actual scenery.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

If you can't communicate, it's like winking at a girl in the dark.

The point is, the only real tools we have are our eyes and our heads. It's not the act of seeing with our eyes alone; it's correctly comprehending what we see. Treating life as an autopsy.

We say, 'I see what you mean,' it's the metaphor for clarity. But sometimes I wish people could see the pictures in my head, instead of my having to describe them with words. Words are clumsy. I wish I could communicate in pictures.

We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we may quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes'...which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own.

the author's judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin now to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear.

In any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the other characters, and the reader.

communicated indirectly, through metaphor and story.

Maybe it was how you looked at it. Maybe there were things I saw as ugly that other people thought were beautiful.

Quizás todo se trata de la forma en que lo miras. Tal vez hubo cosas que yo veía como feas y otras personas encontraban hermosas.

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

The language that reveals also obscures.

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a text in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a subtext in this book will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise understand it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Home interprets heaven. Home is heaven for beginners.

It is plain that complete havoc must be made of the whole system of revealed truth, unless we consent to derive our philosophy from the Bible, instead of explaining the Bible by our philosophy.

This habit of using words which have no definite meaning is very convenient to writers, but very much the reverse for readers. [What is Darwinism (New York, 1874), p. 21]

Romanists argue that such is the obscurity of the Scriptures, that not only the people, but the Church itself needs the aid of tradition in order to their being properly understood. But if the Bible, a comparatively plain book, in one probable volume, needs to be thus explained, what is to explain the hundreds of folios in which these traditions are recorded? Surely a guide to the interpretation of the latter must be far more needed than for the Scriptures.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

You know, working as an actor, I'm always working within my own imagination.

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

Easter tells us that life is to be interpreted not simply in terms of things but in terms of ideals.

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.