Quotes About Interpretation

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

The last thing Scripture should do is make you blind in the world. Instead, you hear everything, see everything, and feel everything because everything just so happens to point right back to it.

An optimist is someone who figures that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's the bluebird of happiness.

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

Most of us are experts at solving other people's problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.

Just because something makes you smile or laugh ... doesn't mean it's a joke.

Each to their own reality

Life is a work of art, and what you see depends on your perspective.

How we perceive of the world around us determines the outcome of what it is we choose to see or not see

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on.

History is written by the winners.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

The historian amputates reality.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

History is neither written nor made without love or hate.

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

All history is contemporary history.

[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.