Quotes About Interpretation

Increasingly, people seem to interpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling – the incomprehensible should cause suspicion, not admiration. Possibly this results from the mistaken belief that using a mysterious device confers [extra] power on the user.

He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.

A Russian peasant scratching the back of his head means many different things.

The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message.

Ihm gefiel nicht das, was er las, sondern eher das Lesen an sich, oder besser gesagt, der Prozess des Lesens selbst, wo sich da doch immerzu aus den Buchstaben irgendein Wort ergibt, das manchmal weiß der Teufel was bedeutet. Dieses Lesen wurde gemeinhin im Vorraum auf dem Bett im liegenden Zustand vollzogen, auf der Matratze, die infolge dieses Umstands so hart und fest wie ein Fladen geworden war.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

Acaso no conoces sucesos que te conciernen, pero de los que no fuiste testigo? ¿No te encuentras, a veces, contándolos? Hay muchas cosas que recordamos que nunca hemos visto con nuestros propios ojos ni vivido con nuestros propios cuerpos. Es una simple cuestión de encajar lo que sabemos, lo que nos han contado y lo que imaginamos. No es muy diferente a cómo un investigador reúne las respuestas a un crimen.

The best listeners listen between the lines.

Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.

In the absence of facts, we tell ourselves stories.

In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble?

As an engineer, he finds the act of art beyond him. The idea that the object itself: canvas, wood and oil is not the point. And that instead, some intangible experience created from the suggestion -- from the intersection of materials, colors, and content has been created. Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

Though the language spoken here appears to be the same, the meaning of each word can be vastly different. What they mean when they say freedom. What they mean when they say equal. What they mean when they say fair.

His job is to communicate information and ideas, and how is he supposed to do that when language itself has become meaningless?

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

And what people see the most is his silence, because some kinds of silence is actually visible.

It occurred to me that a lot of beauty has to do with believing it yourself. That half of what we see is just the way it is presented.

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.

To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement o man.