Quotes About Interpretation

Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.

As Parmigianino did it, the right handBigger than the head, thrust at the viewerAnd swerving easily away, as though to protectWhat it advertises.

Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.

My poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate, but I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.

You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.

I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

Clarity believes in all of that. Because she's - well, you know her. Generous and kind and loves everyone - because she's that way, those ideas take on a particularly important meaning to her. She doesn't know... that it wasn't that she was good and kind because of the words, but that the words meant those things because she was good and kind.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

When you look at this mirror I hope you'll remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

The history of the Bible is thus the story of the interplay between the religion and the book Ã¢â'¬â€œ neither mapping exactly onto the other.

There are versions of Christianity that claim to be simply 'biblical' (no versions of Judaism do so), but the reality is that the structures and content of Christian belief, even among Christians who believe their faith to be wholly grounded in the Bible, are organized and articulated differently from the contents of the Bible.

Fundamentalist models of scriptural authority Ã¢â'¬â€œ and even official attitudes towards it in non-fundamentalist churches Ã¢â'¬â€œ elide this historical dimension by treating the Bible as in some sense a single book.

but even such apparently universal texts as the Ten Commandments were written for and presuppose a society utterly different from our own, and cannot be applied today without extensive interpretation.

This is even more obviously true of the books of the prophets (Chapter 4), which arose from various specific political crises in Israel's history, and in any case often seem to speak in riddles.

These beliefs are partly drawn from Scripture, partly not, and the interplay between the surface meaning of the biblical text and the meanings that have been read into it is part of the fascination of biblical study. In

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.

Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, wilfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.

Sport, truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. You believe what you choose and I'll believe what I know

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.