Quotes About Interpretation

What you "learn" from Steve Jobs tells more about yourself than about him!

He observed himself performing an act of kindness toward Franklin, which he explained to himself by constructing the most plausible story—that he did so willfully, because he liked Franklin after all.

People often indiscriminately use absolutes in their utterances: every, everyone, everything, all, always, never, no one, nothing. Rarely are these absolute terms justified.

When we view things horizontally, we feel confusion; but when we see things vertically, life makes sense—including the direction of history. Everything changes when we interpret events below with wisdom from above and see things as the Lord does in heaven.

In Revelation, John frequently used the number seven, indicating completion or perfection.

Everyone uses their own dictionary.

I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit.

First you must have the images, then come the words.

You make pictures, not take them? Yes. At least that's how I think of it. That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living... I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image.

Here it is important to note that a basic rule in the interpretation of historical evidence is that any piece of evidence depends upon the context from which it is taken.

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

I know there are a lot of readers that think I've got a very crappy marriage just because of the things going on with Rick and Lori but there's really nothing that's been like a mirror. I'm just making this stuff up.

The thing about smart mother fuckers is that sometimes, they sound like crazy mother fuckers to stupid mother fuckers...

You have a valid complaint, and I do recognize it ... but you are reading into things a little bit. Just the same, I will do my best to make horrible things happen to a bunch of white people before something else so graphic hits a minority character.

That's the way it is with Appian; things that appear ridiculous on average just might have happened, so they cannot be entirely dismissed.

When the combined taste, smell, and textural stimuli reach the brain, they remain to be interpreted. Whether the overall sensation will be pleasant, repulsive, or somewhere in between will depend on individual physiological differences, on previous experience ("just like my mother used to make"), and on cultural habituation (haggis, anyone?).

Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor's craft.

The obvious reason for this is that Plato is himself mythopoeic: when he abandons dialectic to "theologize," he does so not by interpreting existing texts or stories but by generating new myths.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

The skilled observer, not the machine, was the essence of conservation.

the task of the ethnographer is not to determine "the truth" but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others' lives.

I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!

An inspired and infallible passage whose meaning you cannot be sure of is not much more useful than an uninspired, fallible passage.

What do you teach?" "Art history." From Taylor's expression, this made little sense.