Quotes About Interpretation

He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.

Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd and make the learned smile.

Jaime smiled knowingly. Men will read all sorts of things into a knowing smile if you let them.

A smile says more than the way you laughPetra Hermans

Her smile was like a Samuel Beckett play - easy to read but difficult to interpret.

The state reserves the right to be the sole interpreter of the needs of society.

The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

What a society deems important is enshrined in its art

The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.

Happy people are poor psychologists.

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.

Experience of others can be known only as a processed, interpreted story of what the others lived through.

la verdad, ni bien es pronunciada, se transforma inmediatamente en una opinión entre tantas, es contestada, reformulada, reducida a un tema discursivo entre otros.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognized by burning. from A Poem is a Walk, Epoch 18 (Fall 1968): 114-19.

No verse of Scripture yields its meaning to lazy people.

He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse

Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn't my memory of a memory also real?

What is art, anyway, except not pounding on walls.

Nearly anything that can be said about Hinduism can be contradicted by something else that is equally true about it, and nothing whatever that is said about it can be entirely true or entirely false

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.

Thus Judaism is based upon a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation, upon the will of God and upon the understanding of Israel.

to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

It is the Bible that enables us to know the Bible.