Quotes About Interpretation

Luck is statistics taken personally.

It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.

Even one person's misunderstanding [of a blue joke] may not be worth the next guy's laugh.

even the Christian heaven is just real human hell. Add eternal to anything, even eating pussy while listening to Dylan, and you get hell.

I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees us peeing in his water bowl.

Perhaps I'm the only crazy person in here, but I understand zero - I mean ZERO - of what you said!

Is it the darkness that is light, or the luminous that is dark? A choice must be made. The same is true of history; people choose what to see, what is light and what is darkness.

I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.

Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.

it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet

What these thinkers, chroniclers, and interpreters have written about, how they have theorized their scholarly endeavors, and their approaches and methodologies have inevitably been informed and shaped by the times in which they existed.

Statistics mean nothing to the individual. Not a damn thing.

Statistics mean nothing to the individual.

Charley wondered how it happened that men of the cloth always seemed to misunderstand the ways of the Lord. If you wanted protection you had to ask for money or love, and He would give you protection instead. Prayer was a study in misdirection...

First, we must learn to read the Bible with our heads, in order to understand what is actually, objectively, being said. And second, we must learn to read it with our hearts, in order to experience God's voice through its pages. By carefully studying the Bible, we come to understand what its writers were originally saying. And by prayerfully exploring it, we learn to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to us now.

important to do both. If I understand what the Bible means but never hear what it says to me personally, I have information without revelation. But conversely, if I disregard its original context and ignore the bits I don't like or don't understand, I will be in grave danger of abusing God's Word by confusing it with my own feelings, preferences, and prejudices.

The ultimate challenge of a Jesus-centered hermeneutic is that it makes love the lens through which we must henceforth read, interpret, and apply all Scripture. "The whole Bible does nothing but tell of God's love," says Augustine of Hippo.

I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who'd learned his craft as a teenager from his father. We spent the day watching him double-distill brown bog water in two oil drums over a turf fire into something that tasted like the finest malt. Noel acted as interpreter, as the old man spoke no English. Perhaps he'll have another adventure in store for me this time.

Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.

Our purpose is to address the question of Washington's religion and to answer it in a definitive way, using Washington's own words. Was he a Christian or a Deist? 12 We believe that when all the evidence is considered, it is clear that George Washington was a Christian and not a Deist, as most scholars since the latter half of the twentieth century have claimed.

Thus, when we interpret the Old Testament correctly, without allegory or artificial manipulation but in accordance with Jesus's own teaching, the central message on every page is Christ. That does not mean that every verse taken by itself contains a hidden allusion to Christ, but that the central thrust of every passage leads us in some way to the central message of the gospel. II.

So, interpretation must proceed wholly by fitting those authors into their social and historical environments. Anything else is alleged to be a denial of history or a denial of humanity.