Quotes About Interpretation

we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.

I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it.

IF I CAN BUT MAKE THE WORDS AWAKE THE FEELING. —Ian Anderson, Stand Up

synesthete.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

Bazen etraf?m?zda o kadar esrarl? bir hâdise olur ki ince teferuat?na kadar bunu sezeriz, fakat hiçbir ?ey idrak etmeyiz; ruhumuzun içinde ikinci bir ruh her ?eyi anlar, fakat bize anlatmaz, böyle korkunç i?aretlerle bizi muamman?n derinliklerine atar ve bo?ar.

Zaaf anlar?nda, insan?n can s?k?c? bir vak?ay? tahsis edemeyerek umumile?tirmesi ve bir felâketi ayn? seri içindeki bütün menfi ihtimallere te?mil ederek hepsini hakikat gibi görmesi yüzünden ?inasi de, Neriman'?n arkada?? taraf?ndan davet edilememesinin hususî sebeplerini ara?t?ram?yor, bütün Darülelhan k?zlar?n?n kendisinden ho?lanmad???n? zannetmeye kadar var?yordu.

Beyond a certain point, the music isn't mine anymore. It's yours.

not being able to read music is absolutely liberating for me. It gives me a wider musical vocabulary. There

Eighty percent of all questions are statements in disguise.

If they can't find those answers in your holy writings, they'll move on to the next person's holy writings.

The wavefunction tells us where we might potentially find an electron when we look; but what we do find in any given experiment is random, and we can't meaningfully say why we find it here rather than there.

It is as if there is another world just waiting to be discovered if only we can learn to see in a new way. Up until the seventeenth century most people in England took little notice of the prehistoric monuments that littered the land. Viewing them as a nuisance, they often dismantled them to clear fields or to provide building materials. Even so, folklore and stories lingered around many of them

People take things differently. What one person would consider a helpful inquiry another might take as an aggressive criticism.

The more you want to explain about a black swan event like the storming of the Bastille," wrote the sociologist Duncan Watts, "the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

The psychological term for this process is "construal," which refers to the way that each of us understands and explains the world. Once

Of course even as Ave Bury, the "Ave" reverts back to the root of "Eve" which I know means "female serpent.

A Christian view of art thus stands in opposition to the postmodern assumption that there are no absolutes.

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough.

There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.