Quotes About Interpretation

A beautiful object has no intrinsic quality that is good for the mind, nor an ugly object any intrinsic power to harm it. Beautiful and ugly are just projections of the mind. The ability to cause happiness or suffering is not a property of the outer object itself. For example, the sight of a particular individual can cause happiness to one person and suffering to another. It is the mind that attributes such qualities to the perceived object.

It is not the things we see, but the mind we see them with, which makes the real interest of travelling.

Christians today and for many centuries have assumed that the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2-3 is the source of the belief in original sin. Adam

Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into the Academy, and said, "This is Plato's man." On which account this addition was made to the definition: "With broad flat nails."

Jelkes came to the conclusion that Mona knew exactly what she was doing, and that it was not the slightest use to speak to her.

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

If I should try to put it into words, I mean how I did see her, it would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. The more we learn of a person, the less we know.

The way she said "dinner" and the way she said "champagne" gave meat and liquid their exact difference, as if by having surmounted two mediums, earth and air, her talent, running forward, achieved all others.

Art destroys silence.

A fresh approach to a work of music (...) usually comes to those who have a fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general.

Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth [Symphony] was about.

I hate Toscanini. I've never heard him in a concert hall, but I've heard enough of his recordings. What he does to music is terrible in my opinion. He chops it up into a hash and then pours a disgusting sauce over it. Toscanin 'honoured' me by conducting my symphonies. I heard those recordings, too, and they're worthless.

This quality of Jewish folk music [- it can appear to be happy when it's tragic-] is close to my idea of what music should be. The should always be two layers in music.

Glazunov was the first to convince me that a composer must make the performers submit to his will, and not the other way around (...) The composer must orchestrate in the way he conceived his work, and not simplify his orchestration to please the performers.

Stvari, i sve oko nas, imaju ono lice koje im mi dajemo.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

So if you refer to it as source energy there's only one way to interpret that. Because source energy does not have propaganda.

Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.

I have no soul: I am not a substance, and there is no real me. There is only what I am able, rather uncertainly, to make of myself as I go along, and what you can make of me: that is, I am only a stream of events, a process in time, and all ideas of me are only interpretations of that process, or bits of it.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

Según esto, cuando vean que está establecida en el lugar santo la abominación desoladora que predijo el Profeta Daniel (quien lea esto, nótelo bien):

Sometimes the distinction between theft and homage is murky.