Quotes About Interpretation

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Hubo un tiempo, no muy remoto aún, en el que los villanos eran gente buena. Se llamaban «villanos» porque vivían en una villa. Pero, como otras palabras transformadas por el azar del tiempo, el carácter humilde e ignorante de los villanos se convirtió en sinónimo de indecencia, grosería y maldad. Tal parece que ni los propios villanos comprenden por qué la historia los ha convertido en malos.

Die Dinge haben nur den Wert, den man ihnen verleiht.

We always speak well when we manage to be understood.

When you move something, you discover new meanings in it, Kristina thought, watching them.

Depending on your point of view, Ashley (or Leslie Howard) was sensitive, poetic, and enigmatic-- or wan and a wimp. Rhett/Clark Gable was sexy, virile, and funny or just crude and unmannerly. The outcome was a crucial barometer of taste that would reveal a great deal, possibly too much, about a girl's temperament and predilections.

His eyes skated across my body, taking in my paint-splattered overalls and the hot pink tank top I wore underneath it. He couldn't see that my tank top had Big Bird on it. But he looked at me like he knew.

If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.

Maybe da Vinci didn't serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.

Each man creates god in his own image.

0.00000001% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works

There is an old joke that asks, "What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: someone who makes you an offer you cannot understand.

Many remarkable advances in knowledge have resulted from our questioning the truth of propositions which we previously regarded as "self-evident." And a critical study of human beliefs reveals how much "interpretation" is present in what at first sight seems like "immediate knowledge.

Another example may also help us to appreciate the abstractness of numbers. Mathematically, is equal to . But the corresponding physical fact may not be true.

Predicamos la caridad y la compasión, pero raras veces lo que significan".

History is alwys written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future

Everything I say is actual, not factual

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess

Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate.

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.