Quotes About Interpretation

Frequently, trite ideas or unimaginative translation of those ideas is the result not of poor subject matter but of poor interpretation of a problem.

with that in unbiased and will hopefully understand my feelings.

Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen.

The privilege of the living is to misquote the dead.

I love the way Miriam looks, because it's not based on anything human; she's going for German Expressionism or Kabuki sheet cake.

Ah, well, the truth is always one thing, but in a way it's the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows where people's hearts lie.

All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

The wrong answer is the right answer to a different question.

If there is a moral in this book, it is not my fault. If there is social relevance, it crept in without alerting me, in which case I would have hit it with a stick." (from preface to a later edition of the novel)

I'd like to hear your opinion on this piece of Beethoven. And remember, it is not Beethoven who is being examined here.

Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself.

When their feelings don't fit the facts, they may unconsciously revise the facts to fit their feelings. This may be one reason why their perception of events is different from yours.

With BPD, the cause of an argument is not necessarily the actual event but the person with BPD's interpretation of that event. As you probably know, you and the person with BPD may come to very different conclusions about what was said and done.

Heldmann believes that things that get in the way of listening include preoccupation with your own point, distracting thoughts, deciding that you already know what the other person is going to say, and twisting the speaker's message to fit your expectations.

Heldmann suggests paraphrasing, or repeating, the key points of the speaker's statements to show that you want to understand what the person is saying. Develop your own style of doing this so it comes across naturally.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

Faith cannot guarantee factual truth. But faith can and must interpret the meaning of facts from the point of view of man's ultimate concern. In doing so it transfers historical truth into the dimension of the truth of faith.

David always pronounced the name to rhyme with Snowy, Tintin's faithful terrier, but his northern colleagues, like Mick Ronson, pronounced the Bow part to rhyme with plow.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.

Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic.

Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.