Quotes About Interpretation

Beauty is in the eye of it's beholder.

When a diplomat says yes he means perhaps; when he says perhaps he means no; when he says no he is no diplomat.

An consultant is someone who takes a subject you understand and makes it sound confusing.

Beware of the man who knows the answer before he understands the question.

If you're photographing in color you show the color of their clothes - if you use black and white, you will show the color of their soul.

Modern jazz: Variations on a non-existent theme

An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be

Reality" is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.

What I said never changed anyone. What they understood did.

A book is a beautifully written troll

Inflate the sentence. Try to make it burst.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Schönheit haftet nicht den Dingen an, sondern liegt im Helldunkel, im Schattenspiel, das sich zwischen den Dingen entfaltet, sagt der Dichter Tanizaki Junichiro. Und ich denke, es ist tatsächlich so, dass die Dinge sich für uns jeweils anders abschatten. Erst in unserem Blick, der immer auch aus einer bestimmten Perspektive, einer Geneigtheit kommt, werden sie schön.

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual... Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it.

The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!

Truth lies not only in what is said, but also in who says it, to whom, why, how and under what circumstances.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

It's as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input.

I was struck by a shallow figure of speech. . . . that Christianity is the handmaiden of capitalism.

Isn't simplification sometimes impoverishment? How to convey the richness of the message with a poverty of symbols. If we oversimplify the form, don't we kill the content?

Even symbols decayed.

Form betrays. Form can betray. What matter, if the eternal meaning retains its true value.