Quotes About Interpretation

Most art will disappear. The past is edited so it always looks clearer to us. Today always looks a bit of a jumble. We'll put up with rubbish from now, but not with rubbish from the past.

Beauty in things lies in the mind which contemplates them.

Beauty in things exists in the mind that contemplates them.

Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.

Beauty in things exits merely in the mind which contemplates them.

judgments. A mistake, therefore, of right may become a species

this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal.

There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

There is not a great deal of pleasure in only seeing what someone else considers their best pictures.

It is important to realise that two conflicting statements can both be equally true depending on the level from which you observe the same situation.

Knowledge is not positive or negative, it is always neutral. It is how knowledge is used that is positive or negative.

The Old Testament is a classic example of the religious recycling which has spawned all the religions. So when you are looking for the original meaning of Genesis and the story of Adam you have to go back to the Sumerian accounts to see how the story has been doctored. Genesis says that 'God' (the gods) created the first man, Adam, out of 'dust from the ground' and then used a rib of Adam to create Eve, the first woman.

Reading the stories was like trying to make out an object through the refracted light of a heavy snowstorm. He could see the snowflakes, immediate and particular, and he could discern the more distant objects that were coated in white: trees, roofs, roads, buildings. But he couldn't actually see any particular object for itself, only the covered outlines.

All this means, first, is that it's necessary to be very clear about what question you are asking, and, second, that whether data are dark or not will depend on that question. Trite though it may sound, the data you need to collect, the analysis you will undertake, and the answer you will get depend on what you want to know.

All we know of Russell's table is what we experience, and our experience differs from that of others and is dependent on where we are standing, what part we touch, how hard we touch it, and on and on. We are the blindfolded men around the elephant, each feeling but a small part of the whole. Some are arrogant enough to believe we can whip off the blindfold and see everything. But since the blindfold is the brain, it is not possible.

Browning, whose verse is famously obscure, was once approached by a woman who asked the meaning of a particular stanza. "Madame," he answered, "when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now, only God knows.

Postmodernism is also simplistic in failing to see its own interpretation of the world (that all metanarratives are evil tools of oppression that must be deconstructed) as an alternative metanarrative.

His method resembles George Bernard Shaw's way of using the /f/ sound of GH in "tough," the /i/ sound of o in "women," and the /sh/ sound of TI in "nation" to write fish as GHOTI. The scribe also

We see trees - they see only posts and beams.

The human brain has a deceptive habit of filling in missing information and ignoring new information that doesn't fit the expectation.

We live in an era when everyone wants to tell his or her story, but there is no real sense of what story means anymore.

If we frame every situation in terms of right and wrong, we never have to wrestle with complexity; if we define the world in narrow bands of black and white, we don't have to parse out endless shades of gray.

She saw more melody in a differential equation than in a piece by Beethoven.