Quotes About Interpretation

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously.

If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset.

A tragédia está nos olhos de quem a observa, e não no coração de quem a sofre

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

Language is fossil poetry

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing

Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,—is the fundamental law of criticism.

The thing about perspective is: something happens. it means nothing. we make up a story about what it means based on what we feel. this story becomes our truth. this story creates our reality, our world, what is possible and what is not.

Motivations and desires affect our perceptions. We don't necessarily see things as they are. We see them as we are.

It is a very good exercise, at least from a historian's point of view, to imagine oneself a devout pagan while reading various Christian writings.

personal expression … book lacks the disciplines of semiology

The forbidden Book says when there's no authority "every man does what is right in his own eyes.

If you cannot understand me in my speech, how can you understand me in my silence?

This is why Jesus challenged the notion that more evidence would have generated more faith. George Macdonald said years ago that to give truth to him who does not love the truth is to only give more reasons for misinterpretation.

All religions are not the same. All religions do not point to God. All religions do not say that all religions are the same. At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not and accordingly, of defining life's purpose.

Take a text out of context, and you make it a pretext.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Kerosene, he said, because the silence had lengthened, is nothing but perfume to me.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it?

Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.