Quotes About Interpretation

Step 3. Clarify. Having heard what they have to say, begin to gather information about the meaning of their communication.

We only know a fraction of our true history based upon some of the facts that we were able to piece together. But the more pieces we discover, the better our understanding of what really happened. History is always being rewritten as more facts present themselves.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

Folks believe the side of the story that suits 'em.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

Camera's don't take pictures, people do.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.' Leopold Stokowski

I think I have a tendency to look at things subjectively rather than objectively when I reflect on my experience.

The purpose of myth, therefore, is to both reveal and conceal. To tell what we have seen and disguise it, to mask God's forked tongue.

every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

The difference between a hermeneutics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion, we might say, lies in the difference between unveiling and unmasking. Here

Even if we are all products of the cultural blender, each mixture of influences, vocabularies, memories, orientations, and temperament possesses a distinct and unmistakable flavor. We make ourselves out of the models we encounter; we give ourselves a form through the different ways we inhabit other forms. And we bring these differences to the event of reading, even as we are reoriented— sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly— by the sum of what we read.

No one can penetrate silence; they can only interpret what is said. However, silence will create an abundance of speculative suppositions.

A sher is made of two poetical lines bearing a complete meaning.

God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

The Bible] has to be interpreted. And if it isn't interpreted, then it can't be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.

Nothing always means something.

One of Renee's friends asked her, "Does your boyfriend wear glasses?" She said, "No, he wears a Walkman.

When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that "You don't have to explain something you haven't said

My cat speaks sign language with her tail.

I began to perceive how relative and instrumental truth could be.

The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the context in which people then were thinking, searching, and trying to find answers .