Quotes About Interpretation

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Escribir será, en el libro, volverse legible para todos y, para sí mismo, indescifrable?

Mis kõige enam lugemist ohustab, on see: lugeja reaalsus, tema isiksus, pretensioonikus ja põikpäisus loetu ees aina iseendaks jääda - inimeseks, kes üldiselt teab, kuidas lugeda. Lugeda luuletust ei tähenda lugeda lihtsalt järjekordset luuletust, see ei tähenda isegi sisenemist luule olemusse selle luuletuse kaudu. Luuletuse lugemine on see luuletus ise, mis ennast lugemises kinnitab.

Kebiasaan untuk menerjemahkan teks dari perspektif para penafsir sebelumnya – yang pandangannya atas realitas tidak sesuai dengan penemuan-penemuan masa kini – memainkan peranan penting dalam kesalahpahaman atas Kitab Suci.

tout semble indiquer qu'il [le passé] ne se conserve pas, mais qu'on le reconstruit en partant du présent.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…

Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.

A 'world' has dimensions. By definition they are not the sole possible ones.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.

It would then be found that the words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world. The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song.

Some think that the painting does not so much express the meaning as the meaning impregnates the painting.

N)o explanatory hypothesis is more clear than the very act by which we take up this incomplete world in order to attempt to totalize it and to think it.

Consider an angry or a threatening gesture...I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself...Everything happens as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, or as if my intention inhabited his body...I understand the other person through my body, just as I perceive 'things' through my body.

Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive--that is, if you wish, silence.

It is only withln the perceived world that we can understand that ail corporeality is already symbolism.

Variations in Ianguage, which at first appear to support the skeptic, are ultimately the proof of its meaning, since words would not change in meaning unless they were trying to say something.

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

Signification is always the divergence: what the other says appears to me to be full of meaning because his lacunae are never where mine are. Perspective multiplicity.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.