Quotes About Interpretation

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

?????, ornis, it means both bird and omen—

Then she begins to move her arms in a short, intricate dance, striking the palm of one hand with the edge of the other, circling her fingers through the air, touching her right ear, finally pointing both index fingers at Joseph. He does not know what to make of it. Her fingers repeat the dance: her hands draw a circle; the palms turn up; the fingers lock. Her lips move but no sound comes out. There is a large silver watch on her wrist which rides up and down her forearm as she gesticulates.

How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It's the central challenge for every artist, Naima. Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

The music of the poem lends meaning to the words, and the meaning of the words lends music to the poem.

It is a mark of a narcissistic age that some Christians have come to interpret these words as suggesting that we make Jesus present by means of our community, when exactly the reverse is the case. The only reason why Christians gather is that Jesus has already united us. We gather not in our names but in His name. It is He who has called us out of the darkness of egoism into His wonderful light.

Mardonius was in the best of humors. Like the Great King at Salamis, he misinterpreted what he saw as disunity, low morale, and incompetence, and ordered an immediate general advance across the Asopus.

It is the judge's responsibility always to seek the truth in trials; while it is the advocate's to make out a case for what is probable, even if it doesn't precisely correspond to the truth.

Theories in the natural sciences which have been replaced by others which do the same job better are of no interest to the current practice of science. This cannot be the case where those theories have helped to constitute what they interpret or explicate. The

There were three main new schools of thought: the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Sceptics. On the whole, if an Epicurean said one thing, a Stoic would say the opposite and a Sceptic would refuse to commit himself either way.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it?

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.

It's always about blame, isn't it? These things happen and you have to find some way to make them make sense.

It could have happened like that.' Why did Hawthorne have to sound so unsure when it was perfectly obvious to me?

It seemed to be a remarkably up-beat interpretation of such an act of vandalism. Her husband's hands were visibly shaking as he held the paper.

seemed to be a remarkably up-beat interpretation of such an act of vandalism. Her

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

'2001: A Space Odyssey' - I'd watched and hated it seven times before it provided the first 'religious experience' I'd ever had watching a film. Finally, I was able to pick up on what the film was transmitting almost entirely through dialogue.

History provides no precise guidelines.

And I think we as a people need to stop being disingenuous about what the Constitution provides for. It does not provide for this all-encompassing power that we've seen exercised over the last several decades. It's what's gotten us into this bankrupt position.