Quotes About Interpretation

In these statements the interpretation of the speaker is given the same validity as the Bible, making the interpreter's words inerrant. I believe in the Bible, but not necessarily in how the Bible is interpreted by humans.

no biblical interpretation is ever developed in a social or cultural vacuum. Most interpretations are autobiographical, where we ascertain the meaning of the text through the telling of our own stories, projecting onto the Bible how we define and interpret the biblical story in light of our own life experiences.

We can only imagine the repercussions if, today, someone took one of their children and attempted to offer him or her as a sacrifice to please God, professing that God had told them to do it. No doubt such a person would be arrested and placed under psychiatric care, as they should be. But the Abraham story has become so familiar that we fail to read its disturbing dark side.

El trabajo del novelista es hacer visible lo invisible con palabras.

Youngsters read it [Don Quixote's story], grown men understand it, and old people applaud it.

It is not the hand but the understanding of a man that may be said to write.

Casi el único valor de las grandes obras maestras del ingenio humano consiste en haber provocado un libro de crítica o de comentario.

No debe importarnos tanto lo que uno quiera decir como lo que diga sin querer...

Me parece ridículo el monopolio que los castellanos de Castilla y países asimilados quieren ejercer sobre la lengua literaria, como si fuese un feudo de heredad. Ni aun la anarquía lingüística debe asustarnos; cada cual procurará que le entiendan, por la cuenta que le tiene.

Eso pasa mucho; el mote mismo que damos a alguien nos suena muy de otro modo cuando se lo oímos a otro

Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.

I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier.

If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.

The shadowy side of real life is ignored, and Western Christianity provides us with nothing which can be used to interpret it. Thus the young men of the West are unable to deal with the mixture of light and shadow of which life really consists; they have no way of linking the facts of existence to their preconceived notions of absolutes.

a terra pertence ao dono, mas a paisagem pertence a quem a sabe olhar.

So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.

But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.

In discarding a literal religious explanation, it becomes easy to discredit the hard-won wisdom often bundled up with it.

A person who is healthy, rich, strong, and powerful has no greater odds of being in control of his consciousness than one who is sickly, poor, weak, and oppressed. The difference between someone who enjoys life and someone who is overwhelmed by it is a product of a combination of such external factors and the way a person has come to interpret them—that is, whether he sees challenges as threats or as opportunities for action.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. [...] To do that we must learn to achieve mastery over consciousness itself.

Artists agree that a painter cannot make a creative contribution without looking, and looking, and looking at previous art, and without knowing what other artists and critics consider good and bad art. Writers say that you have to read, read, and read some more, and know what the critics' criteria for good writing are, before you can write creatively yourself.

Most events in consciousness are built from culturally defined contents as well as from personal meanings developed throughout an individual's life. Thus, two persons can never be expected to have the same experience, and the farther apart in time and place they are, the more the details of the two experiences will differ.

That's the problem with our perspective; we always assume we're right based on the information we have.