Quotes About Interpretation

I received here. When the womenfolk in your palace spoke to me in signs I thought that they were all mute so I responded likewise. It was only after I heard you speak that I regained my speech.

Art is purposiveness without purpose.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables.

We discovered that the scrupulously strict were correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex where nobody else would think of looking for them.

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.

Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to "investigate" and "go in search" of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world.

novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If

fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related.

Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to "prove" the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around.

The texts emphasize that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally. They had nothing to do with ordinary logic or events in this world, but were merely symbols of a more elusive truth.

in a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the "principle of charity"; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an "interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximise truth among the sentences of the corpus."11

our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We

Het was absurd, stelde Filo, om het eerste hoofdstuk van Genesis letterlijk op te vatten en te denken dat de wereld in zes dagen was geschapen. Het getal 'zes' was een symbool voor volmaaktheid.

De rabbijnen wezen er graag op dat koning Salomo ter verklaring van elk vers van de Tora 3000 gelijkenissen gebruikte en dat hij van elke gelijkenis 1005 interpretaties kon geven. Dit betekende dat er 3 015 000 verklaringen waren voor elk stukje tekst. Een tekst die niet radicaal geherinterpreteerd kon worden om de actuele behoeften te bevredigen was dan ook dood.

Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate

Again, what works well in the spiritual domain can become destructive and even immoral if interpreted literally and practically in the mundane world. It

Maimonides agreed that anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Bible must not be interpreted literally, and tried to find rational reasons for some of the more irrational biblical laws. But he knew that religious experience transcended reason. The intuitive knowledge of the prophets, which was accompanied by tremulous awe, was of a higher order than the knowledge we acquire by our rational powers.

The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, would become a mark of their urban culture.

Augustine was not a linguist. He knew no Hebrew and could not have encountered Jewish midrash, but he had come to the same conclusion as Hillel and Akiba. Any interpretation of scripture that spread hatred and dissension was illegitimate; all exegesis must be guided by the principle of charity.

He insisted that it was impossible to understand a single word of the Book of Nature without knowing the language of mathematics.

True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry

Where, My Lord, is music bred—upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.