Quotes About Interpretation

You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question any more.

If the Martians take the writings of moral philosophers as a guide to what goes on on this planet they will get a shock when they arrive.

À ceux-là, en général, j'explique que la vraisemblance importe plus que la vérité, que la justesse compte davantage que l'exactitude et surtout qu'un lieu, ce n'est pas une topographie mais la manière dont on le raconte, pas une photographie mais une sensation, une impression.

All words are written in the same ink, 'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same, and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood' all over the page, the paper would not be stained now would I bleed.

còn cái ??p, ch? không ngh? ng??i ta ph?i g?ng s?c hi?u nó.

What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph

Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.

Even the greatest works of art are couched, not in the language of "mankind," but in the language of a specific cultural tradition, and the loss of the tradition is like the loss of the dictionary;

Grahhhhh." I looked up at LaForce. Did he just, Grahhhhh, at me?

Just the way a dream is a message from your unconscious, a myth is a cultural dream. Decipher the symbols and the meaning of a dream and we understand ourselves better. It's the same with a myth—understanding it gives us insight into a deeper level of our humanity that we all share.

Every reading is a misreading.

Some kinds of literature demand to be treated respectfully. The obligation is on the reader to live up to them and not so much on them to entertain the reader.

Changes in consciousness begin with art and take shape through discussion of art. But the process takes a long time and involves a lot of people working in many small ways.

So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can change my life by changing the way I look at it.

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing.

The symbols mean everything if you accept the feelings that they carry.

told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama's teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we'd read at school, from Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

The world is divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The problem is deciding which is which.

The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.

As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him you like what he wrote.

there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.

It is the reader who comes to complete the work and to close, albeit temporarily, the world that it opens, and the reader does this in a different way every time.

It is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning.