Quotes About Interpretation

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.

As Meier observes, 'Perhaps one reason that we have so little from the historical Jesus on sexual topics is that, apart from the two special cases of divorce and celibacy, where he diverged from mainstream Judaism, his views were those of mainstream Judaism.'14

There are two kinds of observers in science: splitters and lumpers. I've never been much of a splitter; in my heart of hearts, I'm a lumper.) In

Words penetrated the tank from the outer room. They were tantalizing, like those ghosts of meaning in a great symphonyhinting that the composer had caught a glimpse of something notes could only vaguely convey and words could never even approach.

if you just take the outward, literal words of scripture and try to be obedient to the letter without desiring to be obedient to the full spirit of the passage, then it harms you rather than helps you.

Is it that the eye finds what the mind is seeking?

They never get ahead an inch, because they are always hugging some coward maxim, which they can only interpret literally.... Of what use is it "to be sawing about a set of maxims to which there is a complete set of antagonist maxims"? Proverbs, it has been well said, should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half-truth.

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else

They saw the world in different ways. For him, life was like a story that had answers, or a conclusion that made sense. For her, the story was sinuous and unclear, and if there was happiness to be had, it might arrive announced, or it might land in the arms of another person.

They paint what they see and we paint what we are watching.

Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.

Another historian, Molly Greene, wearily describes the decline thesis as a meat-grinder, which converts all the facts into the homogenised elements of a single story rather than the distinct indicators of many different stories.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

Our own filters and biases cloud our abilities to understand and to communicate effectively. It

He read vividly.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cooke that Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their lives were so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway.

Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become "musical scores"—although they might never have been intended to be played.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.