Quotes About Interpretation

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

Science disembodies; art embodies.

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically', they really mean, 'not really'.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

We make versions, and true versions make worlds.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is Metaphysics.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Art isn't a science or a job; it's alive.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.

As for explaining mathematical phenomena it opens the question: explaining to whom? humans?, other computers?

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

Medicine is aptly described as an art, not a science. To this end, four different doctors may have up to four different diagnoses or prescriptions.

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.