Quotes About Interpretation

The common-place critic . . . believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

Red is not in the apple but in the perception.

George Bernard Shaw's famous spelling of "fish" as "ghoti"—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in "tough," the middle letter as in "women," and the last two as in "nation.

The framers discerned fundamental principles.... But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

To give meaning to the Constitution, it is necessary to give it a flexible interpretation, responsive to changing times. The framers could not have foreseen the problems and issues that face our nation today, and the Constitution should not be interpreted as if they had.

People don't see the world as it is, rather we impose our beliefs on what we experience.

As part of our interpretive task, then, we must distinguish between kingdom values and cultural values within the biblical text. With every change in our culture we have to reevaluate our interpretation of Scripture to determine what our perspective should be. At

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.

We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.

Few things were so sure and simple that they could be taken at face value.

She gave Mother Beal a look I couldn't, at that age, interpret but I have since come to think of as profound maternal compassion, a strength emanating from a deep well of endurance that, across my life, I've come to understand was not particular to Sarah Schofield. I've witnessed it in other women who have suffered much without losing their hope or their gift for embracing with forgiveness those who are broken.

I'm a teacher of history in a high school in Saint Paul and what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.

What we use to construct the past is...a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses...a construct of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.

I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed. Take

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels.

We're not arguing. We're discussing." "You're a lawyer; you don't know the difference. I'm arguing.