Quotes About Interpretation

That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.

the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.

the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.

Al lector se le exigirá que asuma una actitud imparcial y objetiva. Esto incluye su aporte a la tarea de lo que Bertrand Russell denominó la "inmunidad a la elocuencia", que significa que el lector es capaz de distinguir entre el placer sensual, el encanto, o el tono insinuante (si lo hubiere) de las palabras y la lógica de su argumento.

Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity.

used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that's not intelligence: It's just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That's when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don't have to think about it. In fact, all thinking will do is lead you away from the truth and soon you'll be back in your head, groping with a penlight in the dark again.

And as an afterthought, this too must be told: Some people have taken pure bullshit and turned it into gold.

People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.

I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn't manifest itself. Like a reflection.' I waited for my sister to expand on that, but she remained quiet. 'LIke a reflection that's different from what's doing the reflecting,' I suggested.

What you hear of me is more a reflection of the speaker than the woman spoken of, especially with regard to my motives. No one can speak for another's heart. Certainly no one ever spoke with accuracy for mine!

With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.

Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it

Zoals we het verleden nu beschrijven was het niet, en zoals het was zullen we het niet kunnen beschrijven.

A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.

I continued, "The painting shows this fish with a big eye and a halo, floating in air, and underneath the fish are all these Native Americans having sex." "What? What does that have to do with Custer's Last Stand?" "Well, the painting is titled, Holy Mackerel, Look at All Those Fucking Indians.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

We make versions, and true versions make worlds.

To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object as it is.' This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is way the object is. I cannot copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less would the result be a realistic picture.

Clairvoyance is the faculty which is awakened when this quality is developed and disciplined, not the clairvoyance of the mediumistic seance rooms, but the true clairvoyance or clear seeing of the mystic. That is, this aspect of the mind has the capacity to interpret that which is seen. Discernment or the capacity to diagnose is the quality of James the son of Alphaeus.