Quotes About Interpretation

Richard Bernstein's Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

Both books are fun to read, and you learn a lot whichever view you adopt. J. David Archibald's Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

David Young, in his excellent book The Discovery of Evolution, strikes just the right note of balance in our interpretation of science; his words can serve as a coda for this chapter:

El lector espera que seas tú el que tenga algo que decir sobre la vida, porque para eso pagamos a los escritores.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

A poem reaches out exactly halfway, then you reach out halfway, then see what happens. If your thinking's willful and generous toward a poem, the poem'll be equally those things back. As for meaning, it'll mean something different to each person.

the planets show what is happening, the signs how it is happening, and the houses where it is happening.

The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague.

Christians who seek to formulate an adequate view of sin, salvation, and how sinners are saved are duty-bound to take seriously the diversity of Christian language.

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

Who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words

It is very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand them thoroughly.

Certainly, reading Post-Structuralist prose is a form of work, like jogging with a nail in your shoe.

The integrity of any theory, Kuhn argued, lies in its falsifiability - that is, its openness to the possibility of repudiation in the light of more evidence, fresh insights or a more creative interpretation of data whose significance was not previously understood.

Words are, of themselves, meaningless. We invest them with meaning, and, over time, come to feel as if certain words mean certain things. We construct dictionaries and then think they tell us what words mean, but dictionaries are mere historical documents, museums of meaning...

People with passionate convictions tend to see the world through the lens of their passion - whether psychological, spiritual, or economic - and interpret everything they hear according to whether or not it harmonises with their own one-note samba

When, indeed, is a thing proven? Only when an individual has accumulated in his own consciousness enough observations, impressions, reasonings and feelings to satisfy him personally that it is so. The same evidence which convinces one expert may leave another completely unsatisfied.

Nothing coats the world bad or good, but thinking makes it so.

El imaginario nos interpela, no es tan primitivo, simple o fantástico como creemos.

The layman's Constitutional view is that what he likes is Constitutional and that which he doesn't like is un-Constitutional. That about measures up the Constitutional acumen of the average person.

La escritura es un pequeño equívoco sin importancia, tan pequeño que nos hace casi mudos

La bellezza delle cose esiste nella mente di chi le osserva

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

You have to feel what's right, and sometimes what's right in art is sad.