Quotes About Interpretation

Good writing does not fail or succeed on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head -- even if in the end you conclude someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be. from intro to What The Dog Saw

Words are not the things they name. Saussere says they take distinctive meaning by contrast with other words. A square is a square because it's not a triangle, not a circle.

I read Hesse's Steppenwolf thrice. The first time I was enchanted, the second time disappointed, the third time appalled.

The burden shouldn't be on the artist to make things the public understands, nor should it be on the museum to show only things that are understandable.

Life is opinion.

It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.

At every instant the objects and events in the world around us bombard us with impressions. As they do so they produce a phantasia, a mental impression. From this the mind generates a perception (hypolepsis), which might best be compared to a print made from a photographic negative. Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original.

14. Let it happen, if it wants, to whatever it can happen to. And what's affected can complain about it if it wants. It doesn't hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.

When you have to deal with someone, ask yourself: What does he mean by good and bad? If he thinks x or y about pleasure and pain (and what produces them), about fame and disgrace, about death and life, then it shouldn't shock or surprise you when he does x or y. In fact, I'll remind myself that he has no real choice.

Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit.

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them, which you can erase right now

Ons leven is slechts wat onze gedachten ervan maken.

nothing is but what thinking makes it.

This can be both a blessing and a curse. You are blessed with a wonderfully unique filter but cursed with a systematic inability to understand anybody else's.

Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.

The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.

To state the obvious, how we see is to a large extent the product of what we have seen.

Modern biblical literalism with its emphasis on factuality is not only very different from what "the literal meaning of a text" has meant for most of Christian history; it also has consequences that minimally are unfortunate and unnecessary and more seriously obscure and distort what the Bible and being Christian are about. Indeed, it discredits the Bible and Christianity in the minds of many people.

As we read the Bible, we are not only to bring our critical intelligence with us, but also to listen.

Its central elements are seen no longer as going back to the historical Jesus, but as the product of the early Christian movement in the decades after his death. Jesus as a historical figure was not very much like the most common image of him.

I am not among the relatively few scholars who think that only that which is historically factual matters.

Biblical inerrancy and the absolute authority of the Bible are thus a post-Reformation Protestant development. The first time the Bible was described as "inerrant" and "infallible" was in a book of Protestant theology written in the second half of the 1600s. Widespread affirmation of biblical inerrancy is even more recent, largely the product of the past one hundred years.

To affirm that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God does not require affirming that he is the only, or only adequate, revelation of God. Christians have sometimes thought so.