Quotes About Interpretation

All philosophers and all sociologists draw their scientific ideas from the sources available at their time.

The word midrash itself springs from the Hebrew, I'drash , meaning 'to question'. . . . midrash invents alternative aspects of character and event, keeping the possibilities open [ Out of the Garden .

The way a book is read- which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.

We see with our brains, not with our eyes,

children learn their experience; they don't necessarily learn what we intend them to.")

A quantitative EEG (QEEG) is a test that can indicate if a patient has a "noisy brain." This study is often done by advanced neurofeedback practitioners, and must be interpreted by an expert who has actually met with the patient, not simply run the information through a machine.

It would take many centuries before Christian preachers started to teach that when Christ said, 'Blessed are the poor for theirs in the Kingdom of Heaven,' he meant not just the poor in spirit (the pious), but the actual impoverished masses of people.

For a word to be a word, it has to refer to something that is not a word.

For Du Bois, there was no such thing as an a priori wrong conclusion; there was only a conclusion proven wrong.

You cannot tell a man's intention by looking at his forehead, you must look through it to the inside of his head; and no judge and jury are capable of looking through the skull of a man who has done nothing but talk to see what goes on inside." And

Ha a történelem igazán tudományos, akkor semmi olyat nem tud mondani, amire érdemes lenne odafigyelni. Ha pedig megpróbálja betölteni azt a szerepet, amelynek korábbi fontosságát köszönhette, vagyis értelmezi a múltat a jelen számára, ez esetben amit igazságként mutat be, a legjobb esetben is csak becslés, olykor pedig egyenesen tévedés.

With most British actors, it's amazing. I think they start with the character on the outside and work in.

A skeptic once said to me, 'I don't believe the Bible because it has miracles.' I said, 'Name one.' He said, 'Turning water into wine. Do you believe that?' I said, 'Yeah, it happens all the time.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Well, rain goes through the grapevine up into the grape, and the grape turns into wine. All Jesus did was speed it up a little bit.

you ought not judge" is itself a judgment! (Pluralists misinterpret Jesus' comments on judging [Matt. 7:1-5]. Jesus did not prohibit judging as such, only judging hypocritically.)

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.

I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

The application of the parable is, I think, that if you do not understand a statement, then to discover that it has no verification is an important piece of information about it and makes you understand it better. That is to say, you understand it better; you do not find out that there

Hermann Hesse a raison de dire que les textes de Kafka ne sont ni religieux, ni métaphysiques, ni moraux , mais simplement poétiques. (p. 250)

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.

The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of quaint, and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.