Quotes About Interpretation

I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.

We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

What typically escalates to conflict begins, as Vargo puts it, with "not communicating, making assumptions, and jumping to conclusions, sending a 'hard' message in ways that make it tough for people to hear what you're saying." Students

I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders. --Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company

Do you do them in that old-fashioned code,like daffodils mean I'm sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you?Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?

He thought she knew what he meant, but the biggest mistake you can make is thinking they know what you mean.

I am. Trying, I'm trying it. But he means something else. I'm trying it like, you find a coin on the table and you spin it for no reason but to see it happen. He's trying it like medical school, because maybe he'll grow up to be a doctor.

Herodotus also repeatedly reports the prophetic power of dreams, though he leaves the reader to judge.

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

The work of artists and scietists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth is its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths becomes tomorrow's disproven hypotheses of forgotten objet d'arts.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway.

As soon as . . . begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

Ele me lembra de que a linguagem é muitas vezes usada como uma barreira em vez de uma ferramenta.

Como você sabe o que sinto? Você toma liberdades com a mente alheia. Não dá pra você saber como me sinto, o que sinto ou por que sinto.

The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

I'm not sure what I.Q. is anyway. Prof. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were—like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff.

As long as the writer, or any artist for that matter, keeps his mouth shut, there can be argument and discussion and various interpretations and meanings. But once the writer explains or analyzes, he trivializes his own work.

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.

The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.

People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even good. What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I know absolutely nothing about art.

Even the most fundamental of the fundamentalists plug their ears when Jesus starts talking about birds of the air and lilies of the field. They know damn well he's just yarning, just making pretty speeches.

But when it's read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: Man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won't be enlightenment, it will be death.