Quotes About Interpretation

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

Perception defines everything.

To one, science is an exalted goddess; to another it is a cow which provides him with butter.

Science does not deny religion, it just offers a simpler alternative.

It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If 'is' means 'is and never has been' that's one thing - if it means 'there is none', that was a completely true statement.

Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.

I've always been a fan of science fiction films, and I've never been able to put my particular spin on it.

Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.

An action made by an unwitting man, shall not define, nor justify a common thought and interpretation.

It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.

There is no such thing as reality, only our perception of it.

With faces entirely invisible through suits, it was hard to be sure, but my impression was that he was watching me and copying my every move. I felt this proved he was intelligent.

Every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it.

He could argue a case for anything, but that doesn't change the fact he's wrong most of the time.

That was a double negative, Jemail. By saying that you haven't seen nobody, you're actually saying that you have seen somebody.

We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is.

An action made by a unwitting man, shall not define, nor justify a common though and interpretation.

A pessimist says the glass is half empty, an optimist says the glass is half full, and an engineer says the glass is too big.

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.