Quotes About Interpretation

A word's fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage.

un romanzo o una poesia sono il prodotto di una reciproca solitudine – quella di uno scrittore e quella di un lettore.

Il poeta, ripeto, è il mezzo di cui la lingua si serve per esistere. O, come ha detto il mio amato Auden, è colui in cui e per cui la lingua vive.

The upper lip is like a groom, to wit: The lower lip is like his fiancee. But that which splits in two will surely split into two hundred just as easily. And everything that's been twofold is then accountable, is then no longer moot.

The reason English-speaking readers can hardly tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they read neither prose. They're reading Constance Garnett.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

Some things die after they born, others born after they die. myths are public dreams, dreams are privet myths...

T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art.

Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.

Dream is the personalized myth, myth is the depoersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche.