Quotes About Interpretation

Northrop Frye said that a poet is a myth's way of making another myth.

The name Wisconsin is believed by some to be a derivation of the word Wishkonsing, place of the beaver.)

listen for the intention of what people say and ignore the words.

There's a famous finding in the psychological literature," Ochsner explains, "showing that six months later, someone who has become a paraplegic is just as happy as someone who's won the lottery. It seems clear people are doing something to find what's positive in even the most dire of circumstances. The one thing you can always do is control your interpretation of the meaning of the situation

we see the world as we are, not as the world is.

Bad things happen in nice places, and nice things happen in bad places. But that doesn't mean the places themselves are hard to tell apart.

History is not truth — it records not what occurred but what is remembered.

One's perception of something often depended on just how the light hit it.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering if that means ketchup is a smoothie.

the gospel, the Christian faith, becomes the interpretive framework with which to make sense of all other knowledge and experience.

Such research has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean that "all diets are alike," or "sticking to a diet, any diet, is the only thing that matters." But these conclusions are simply wrong. This sort of faulty reasoning wouldn't withstand scrutiny in other areas of clinical research. Should we abandon a promising new cancer drug, simply because participants in the experimental group didn't take most of the medicine?

Johann Sebastian Bach presumably had other things in mind when, in about 1723, he wrote his "Air on a G string" (actually so named by a later arranger.) Part of a larger piece for string quartet, the "Air" includes a violin solo that fits entirely on the G string, the lowest of the violin's four strings.

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for "there.

The late sculptor Ken Price put it best: "Nothing I can say is going to improve how it looks.

good art illustrates anything at all, it's likely to be a story you didn't even know needed telling.

One way to look at a painting—and I use that word as shorthand for visual art in general—is to notice as you take its measure what it is you actually find yourself thinking about, which may differ from what you imagine you're supposed to be thinking about.

History's lessons are no more enlightening than the wisdom of those who interpret them.

Language is power. Words shape the way we interact with the world.

aphorism—"A photograph is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know"—

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. —SUSAN B. ANTHONY

If the Bible and other holy books were at all reliable sources of morality, good and bad religious people wouldn't both be able to point to their holy books as guidance and inspiration to support their positions.

It's hard to get to know your unconscious because … it's unconscious. However, thanks to projection, we can externalize our unconscious, and that then gives us the chance to interact with it and come to an understanding of it, and finally allow us to withdraw our projections and integrate them into our consciousness. We make sense of our unconscious via its projections, via what it latches onto in the world around us.

No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.