Quotes About Interpretation

Frank Sheed once said, "The secular novelist sees what is visible; the Christian novelist sees what is there.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

Stories and images can be powerful means for conveying ideas. Every time we read a book or watch a movie, we enter into an imaginative

if everything is historically relative, then so is the idea of historicism itself.

Outside the ivory tower, ordinary people are not interested in a worldview that spins out a logically coherent system, and yet contradicts human experience. They are looking for a worldview that makes sense of the world we actually inhabit. They want one that explains the undeniable facts of human experience, not one that suppresses those facts for the sake of its own internal logical consistency.

And if there is no objective or universal truth, then any claim to have objective truth will be treated as nothing but an attempt by one interpretive community to impose its own limited, subjective perspective on everyone else. An act of oppression. A power grab.

Every history book, no matter how ostensibly objective, is basically lies filtered through bias and a certain amount of relative ignorance.

We've limited Christianity to salvation and sanctification," he said. But "Christianity is the truth about everything. If you say you have a Christian worldview, that means you see the world through that lens—not just how people get saved and what to stay away from." 17

we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

There is no such thing as an immutable truth, much as our hearts might yearn for it and our justice systems demand it; there are only the stories we tell ourselves.

The stories could be true, or they could be conjecture; people stuck stories to her like wet plaster. Into what position would they set?

A young woman's ability to read beyond the bible had little practical value.

That is how a man speaks. And that is why.

This is how we make sense of the world, by trapping it in words and sentences, by pinning it like a butterfly to a felt backcloth, killing it to keep it still, so we may trace its lines.

Forget the story.

A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved," although it does "tell us a good deal about those who hold it."19

Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.

My Torah is also the greatest,' said the rav, 'but those who are mean-spirited have yet to use it.

What is history but a fable agreed upon ?

History is a series of lies on which we agree.

History is a myth that men agree to believe.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Qu'est ce que l'histoire, sinon une fable sur laquelle tout le monde est d'accord.