Quotes About Interpretation

the Old Testament must always be read in light of the New. I never read such Old Testament texts without immediately asking, "Does the New Testament shed additional light on how I am to understand the nature of such promises and their recipients?

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don't see why I can't.

Art isn't a hawk making lazy circles in the sky. Beauty doesn't equal art, and it can't just be the world in a package. It's got to take the world and mess it up some. Add the artifice as a lens, right?

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.

Language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.

A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted.

He'd undertake to prove, by force Of argument, a man's no horse. He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl, And that a Lord may be an owl, A calf an Alderman, a goose a Justice, And rooks, Committee-men or Trustees.

If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.

An artists touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.

He could distinguish and divideA hair 'twixt south and southwest side,On either which he would dispute,Confute, change hands, and still confute.

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The Bible may be the truth but it's not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.

If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

No miracle was effected without means of some kind; the difference between the faithful and the unbeliever consisted in the very fact that the former could see a miracle where the latter could not. The

My boy," returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would