Quotes About Interpretation

I said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

My one quarrel is with words.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.

There is nothing that art cannot express

Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the ocassion. It is not he who is revelead by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas , reveals himself.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. (In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis

Forgive my asking you to use your mind. It is a thing which no novelist should expect of his reader...

the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life

274 My father is just like Piero della Francesca's father: metaphorical.

When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

Bagian terbaik dari sebuah kecantikan adalah bahwa tak ada gambar yang bisa melukiskannya. Loren Blake - Betrayed

Nicht alles, was hell ist, ist gut. Und nicht alles, was dunkel ist, ist schlecht. Die Dunkelheit und das Böse sind nicht immer gleichzusetzen, ebenso wie das Licht nicht immer Gutes verheißt.

darkness does not always equate to evil, just as light does not always bring good.

When Lynette described everything that had happened, the puzzle pieces fell into place from my last vision. Goddess, I hate figurative language.

everything is relative. you, for instance, are my relative.

The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.

Trouble, after all, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder

Have you lost the girl you love?' 'That's what I'm trying to figure out. I can't make up my mind. It all depends what construction you place on the words "I never want to see or speak to you again in this world or the next, you miserable fathead."' 'Did she say that?

A more practised physiognomist would have been able to interpret that look. It was the one that butlers always wear when they have allowed themselves to be persuaded against their better judgement into becoming accessories before the fact in the theft of their employers' pigs.