Quotes About Interpretation

In the dark, all cats are black.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

They who strive to build up a firm faith in Scripture through disputation are doing things backwards.

for when any one understands this Epistle, he has a passage opened to him to the understanding of the whole Scripture.

When Calvin protested against allegorizing, he was protesting not against finding a spiritual meaning in a passage, but against finding one that was not there. The

What is said of the law applies to the whole of Scripture: when it is not directed toward Christ as its one aim, it is tortured badly and twisted.

whenever God revealed himself to be seen by the fathers, he never appeared as he is in himself but as he could be understood by human minds. Since

It is absurd to boast of zeal for the law, when one neglects the divine interpretation of it. So

Therefore, we are today far from wrong in applying this prophecy to the papists, who urge celibacy and abstinence from foods more forcefully than any precept of God. They

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.

What greater violence can be done to the poet's experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? …It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.

The astrologer who spells the stars, mistakes his globes, and in her bright eye interprets heaven's physiognomies.

Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")

No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader.

THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES, only patterns we do not see.

where there are books, there will always be haters of books alongside the lovers of them.

Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You

On Sundays, the priest would often explain the Bible story that had just been read out loud. David didn't always listen because the priest was very dull indeed, but it was surprising what the priest could see in stories that seemed quite simple to David. In fact, the priest appeared to like making them more complicated than they were, probably because it meant that he could talk for longer.

Painting is with me but another word for feeling.

It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes Present the object, but the Mind descries. We see nothing till we truly understand it.