Quotes About Interpretation

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

This is classic data mining. You draw a conclusion and then mine the data retrospectively to find support for it. You invariably do.

even her intuition and knowledge of human nature were far from perfect. She understood it in the aggregate, but in any given situation, who knew?

Was I the only person in the world clueless enough to have always thought that AD meant After Death,

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says. He is always convinced that it says what he means." —George Bernard Shaw

If I claim that an invisible giant hamster is hovering above me, I'm a lunatic. If I sense the spirit of God hovering above me, I'm simply a spiritual being.

secrecy that eventually landed him in jail? We are not just the sum total of everything that has happened to us, but also a testament to the way we have interpreted all that has crossed our path. The music of chance intersecting with the maddening complexities of choice – and how, in the wake of bad judgment and self-sabotage, we so often rewrite the scenario to create one that we can live with.

When it comes to women, men only hear what they want to hear. It's one of the many failures of their sex.

The interpretation of the world through the lens of 'social justice', 'identity group politics' and 'intersectionalism' is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.

fascism'. 1 Yet however abused, anybody offering

Whereas a term that one person may use unwittingly can in some cases be levelled against them (Cumberbatch), in other cases extreme terms which people are using knowingly do not in fact count as being the words they have used. This is the explanation that Klein, El-Wardany and others have given. Whereas some people unwittingly use the wrong term and can be castigated for it, other people use terms that are so wrong and so extreme and yet no especial castigation is due.

Which leads to a question that everybody in genuinely diverse and pluralistic societies must at some point ask: 'Do we take other people at face value, or do we try to read behind their words and actions, claim to see into their hearts and there divine the true motives which their speech and actions have not yet revealed?

grievance studies

A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

The angles are the director's thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy.

Often we go through an entire conversation – or indeed an entire relationship – without ever realizing that each of us is paying attention to different things, that our views are based on different information.

The truth is, intentions are invisible. We assume them from other people's behavior. In other words, we make them up, we invent them. But

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

May it not be said of us that the millennium is a thousand years of peace that Christians love to fight about.

And what sound does ough make? As somone once noted, "A rough, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." This should be read by the learned as "A ruff, doe-faced, thawtful plowman strode throo the streets of Scarboruh; after falling into a sloo, he coffed and hiccupped." Quite a language we have here.

If clichés were candied fruit, walnuts, and raisins, the Book of Psalms in The Message would be a three-pound fruitcake.

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean?

Talking about what "religion" does in the world is like defining "medicine" as "pills in bottles." I am not sure you should take that. My aunt took a pill from a bottle once and was sick for a week.

The trick is to state what we know in a recognizable fashion but in a way that is slightly off, in a way that arrests us.