Quotes About Interpretation

The most respectful reading we can give to the text, the reading most faithful to the face value of the text—and the most "literal" understanding, if you will—is the one that comes from their world not ours. Consequently

Prior to taking up philosophy I had spent half a decade as an art student and I am quite sure that what persuaded me of the importance and veracity of these ancient ideas was my art school education. For art making is all about discerning and creating structures. When later, as a philosophy student, I read Wittgenstein's instruction to attend to the differences, I heard an echo of the art teacher's command to look at the gaps between objects and draw them also.

people could walk the same road and see different things.

But people could walk the same road and see different things.

I had either been insulted or praised. Perhaps both.

Imprecision is, on the whole, highly prized. Definition and categorization are, by contrast, suspect. For

Every fool in error can find a passage of scripture to back him up

Didn't Shakespeare say something about 'every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up'? He knew his religious bigots.

Funny how one little word can mean 'full of or disposed to joy and mirth', 'homosexual' and 'rubbish'. It just shows that context is everything.

He has his world and I have mine and we each speak our own kinds of English in them. But we also have a shared world where we need a dependable common language if we are all going to get by. And

Some physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill; others, that it is a fermenting vat; others, again that it is a stew-pan; but in my view of the matter, it is neither a mill, a fermenting vat nor a stew-pan, but a stomach gentlemen, a stomach.

we compose our life in stories we tell ourselves

In Chinese, the character for danger is the same one for opportunity." -- Kim Ling Levine in Madhattan Mystery

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

The Constitution was written by 55 educated and highly intelligent men in Philadelphia in 1787, but it was written so that it could be understood by people of limited education and modest intelligence.

While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his or her own beliefs, et cetera. Then the woman said, "It's just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different" (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant). "Tell me which one of 'em gets out to help," the man said, "that's the one whose religion I'll listen to.

If ads are about selling things, they are not only about selling things; their images can carry symbolic meanings, transmit messages, and create moods in ways that cannot be reduced to the conscious intentions of their creators and cannot be wholly controllable and predictable in their efffects.

Protestants appeal to Scripture against the Church, "they forget that it is from this very Church, and on her authority, that Scripture is received.

Holy Scripture is the work of the Holy Ghost, it can be rightly and infallibly interpreted by Him alone or under His guidance. Now, God did not promise the Holy Ghost to every reader of the Bible, but only to the Church.

The (Bible) story is much more powerful as Truth than as metaphor.

Considera las palabras dichas como un medio de llegar a la verdad. Yo las considero un medio para ocultarla.

aceptar aparentemente lo que otra persona dice, mientras se comprende la verdad subyacente.

Enseña a tres personas una fotografía de un clavo. Las dos primeras dirán «eso es un clavo», pero el psicoanalista replicará: «Eso es un objeto de hierro inventando hace miles de años y diseñado para unir dos bloques de madera durante un largo período de tiempo. Sin embargo, hace falta un martillo para que funcione de manera eficaz y un carpintero para dirigirlo certeramente de modo que pueda desarrollar todo su potencial...».

The woman in front of him seemed like the work of an artist who had taken the few lines that sketched out a teenager and added color and shape to create a full portrait.