Quotes About Interpretation

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

There is no such thing as happy music.

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

Quand vous regardez le plafond de cette chambre, qu'est-ce que vous y voyez? -L'intérieur de ma tête. -C'est comment? -Opaque.

La poesía sirve sobre todo para complicar las cosas, ¿no? Pero igual complicándolas se entienden mejor. Y al entenderlas se simplifican.

He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.

THE RAW MATERIAL of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of man, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus—they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.

Nihilism appears at that point, not that the displeasure at existence has become greater than before but because one has come to mistrust any meaning in suffering, indeed in existence. One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain.

Fredrich Nietzsche

Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.

sometimes a digar is just a cigar

Parfois un cigar est seulement un cigar comme dit Freud, mais aussi Clinton !

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

I obviously do everything to be hard to understand myself

The text has disappeared under the interpretation.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

No artist tolerates reality.