Quotes About Interpretation

an optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

History is man's best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order.

A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it, and what is one man's comfort and inspiration is another's jest and scorn.

However, no human being - and certainly no man - has the right to define for me what my understanding of God is.

A man notices a womans figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.

Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

A man may just as soon read the Scripture without eyes, as understand the spirit of it without grace.

Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

It is a way of calling a man a fool when no attention is given to what he says.

Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language.

It appears to me that men are trying to speak for God instead of letting God speak for himself.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.

One man's Voltaire is another man's Screech.

Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.

A mad man sees what he sees.

One man's accuracy is another man's bullshit.

Any man that walks the mead In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find, According as his humors lead, A meaning suited to his mind.