Quotes About Interpretation

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

He made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of talk--why had she said this? what had she meant by that? why had she done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation, and with a young man of Ogden's temperament speculation was but the first step on the way to love.

Tertullian argued that the Bible is often difficult to interpret. Obscure passages must be interpreted by those which are plain.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Statistics are no substitue for judgement.

It is up to each individual consciousness to develop its own symbol or symbols, its own symbolic universe.

How should the first two chapters of the book of Genesis be understood in their internal, that is, spiritual, sense? It must be done by applying what the Christian world has so utterly forgotten: that everything in the Word, to the smallest detail, envelops and signifies spiritual and celestial things.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language.

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

I've made a picture of the world. It may be right. It may be wrong. But for me it is very real ...

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler.

The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth

the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are 'frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes'. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

Johnson the poet recognizes that there are times when a little scientific precision may be sacrificed in the interests of a memorable formula. Thus 'to hiccough' is 'to sob with convulsion of the stomach', while an 'embryo' is 'the offspring yet unfinished in the womb'. 'Thumb' is defined simply as 'the short strong finger answering to the other four'. A 'puppet' is 'a wooden tragedian'.

As we have seen before, this finely tuned judgement also allows Johnson to discriminate deftly between the different senses of a particular word. Thus there are sixteen senses of 'world', ranging from 'the great collective idea of all bodies whatever' to 'the earth; the terraqueous globe'

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it --this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) examines the very thin line separating a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something a community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn't want to consider.

their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Kurt Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game Civilization III into

Even for a child, the major component of lipreading is guesswork. It's often said that only 30 to 40 percent of lipreading is actual "reading" of each word; the rest is "context guessing" to fill in the gaps between the words that are actually understood.

Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance.