Quotes About Interpretation

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practical man relies on the language of the first.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

a good reader makes a good book

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative man.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It

No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This

As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most

Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The telltale body is all tongues.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.

Es tan malo, entonces, el ser mal interpretado? Pitágoras fue mal interpretado, y lo fueron Sócrates, Jesús, Lutero y Galileo, y lo fueron todos los espíritus puros y graves que han honrado a la humanidad. Ser grande es ser mal comprendido.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it.

Literature is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two

What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?