Quotes About Interpretation

Ancient writers sometimes meant what they said and occasionally even knew what they were talking about.

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

What is meaningful are not the words, the mere sound sequences spoken or letter sequences on a page, but the conceptual content that the words evoke. Meanings are thus in people's minds, not in the words on the page.

To be accepted, the truth must fit people's frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off. Why?

Here we find a power of metaphor that we have not previously discussed, the power of revelation. This is the power that metaphor has to reveal comprehensive hidden meanings to us, to allow us to find meanings be- yond the surface, to interpret texts as wholes, and to make sense of patterns of events.

What we are concerned to provide throughout this book is in- stead a prerequisite to any such discussion, namely, a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the role of metaphor in the way we understand a poem.

it's not enough just to say "equality" or "responsibility" in a speech, because conservatives and progressives each have their own understanding of what these values mean. You have to talk about your understanding of each of these words.

This Strict Father interpretation of evolution can then be turned metaphorically into Social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in society; and then, via the metaphor of the Moral Order Is the Natural Order, the social survival of the fittest can be seen as moral.

Truth must be framed effectively to be seen at all.

It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world.

In cognitive science there is a name for this phenomenon. It's called hypocognition—the lack of the ideas you need, the lack of a relatively simple fixed frame that can be evoked by a word or two.

a basic principle of framing: When you are arguing against the other side, do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won't be the frame you want.

The fundamental frames through which you understand the world are physical.

You can only make sense of what your brain allows.

Women have a way of contorting things sometimes. We all have our moods, ups and downs. Or if the guy doesn't say anything when you walk out with a new top and the guy has no idea why you're mad at him. So of course, women are complicated.

Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

I never know where women are coming from.

I might have lost an acquaintance because of 'Pregnant Women Are Smug.' But we weren't close. Actually, I don't know if the woman knows the song is about her. I have a feeling she might.

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, 'Very interesting interpretation!' I thought I was playing it right.

They say it all started out with a big bang. But, what I wonder is, was it a big bang or did it just seem big because there wasn't anything else drown it out at the time?

When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.

I wonder if games are maybe a terminus for ideas. Things can be books or movies or operas or plays, but once they're a game, that's where they should end. Things shouldn't start as games and be taken to movies.