Quotes About Interpretation

The truth is the truth whether you agree with it or not. The truth is not subject to your interpretation.

Ronald Coase cynically observed that, "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

When a theory is generated by ransacking data, we can't use these pillaged data to test the theory.

Be doubly skeptical of graphs that have two vertical axes and omit zero from either or both axes.

Faith is, at heart, the central relationship that gives meaning to our life; we are able to interpret our experiences in light of that relationship. Or as Katherine Dyckman and L. Patrick Carroll put it, To `faith' is to hand over the direction of one's journey to another, to yield up . . . `the illusion of control' to someone who is essentially beyond our control, over whom we have no power (1981:8 9).

We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us.

If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice-look for its adjective.

It was one of those kinds of looks that changes meaning with time and place.

Words, when compared with feelings, are too concrete, too arbitrary, whereas feelings are richer but more elusive—ambiguous, if you will. Where words are muted, feelings begin.

She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas's mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.

Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, "It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up.

that everything, whatever happens, has three meanings.

It is not well to spend one's symbols improvidently.

The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another … With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables.

what a many-sided thing is the telling of any tale.

Lange claimed that every photograph was a self-portrait of the photographer.

Photographers sometimes take pictures of each other; occasionally they take pictures of each other at work; more usually they take photographs - or versions - of each other's work. Consciously or not they are constantly in dialogue with their contemporaries and predecessors.

Arbus would later insist, 'the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture

He might as well have been talking English, for all Mae understood him.

And shame it is, if that a priest take keep, To see a shitten shepherd and clean sheep:

For thus men seyth, That on thenketh the beere, But al another thenketh his ledere.