Quotes About Interpretation

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

The whole world has gone back to something we are genetically engineered to do - communicating through symbols.

Symbols have power and meaning and can mean different things to different people at different times and in different contexts.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.

The book of Revelation is written largely in symbols.

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

To me, a song is not finished. To me, there's no such thing as a finished anything. All of Beethoven's nine symphonies, to me, are one. I think of it as having no beginning and no end.

In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

I tend to write short, brief snippets - I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.

If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?

There's this whole other element of film scoring, which is the social and psychological side of how you're dealing with people... And that is not always in sync with what's right for the picture.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?