Quotes About Interpretation

This would explain much of human suffering, according to my ex, who was being less playful than you might think. He really did believe that's how it was: each of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else. Even people in love? I asked, smilingly, teasingly, hopefully. This was at the very beginning of our relationship. He only smiled back. But years later, at the bitter end, came the bitter answer: People in love most of all. —

When do people ever like it when you write about them? But I had to do something. As I said, from the minute I heard what had happened I could not stop thinking about it. So I did what you do if you're a writer and you're obsessed about something: you turn it into a story that you hope will lay it to rest, or at least help you figure it out what it means. Even if we know from experience that this pretty much never works.

When I ask him why he thinks I should have known that he was writing about himself, he looks puzzled and says, Who else would I be writing about?

That's deep, he said with just a hint of mockery. You a psychologist? I told him I was a writer.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does.

Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened

I stared until I was blind at the fact that Otto didn't understand me. It never occurred to me that I didn't understand him.

our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. Success will be a matter not of how much you know at the end, but of what you can do when the going gets tough: when the seas of argument rise, and confusion breaks out. Success will mean taking seriously the implications of ideas. WHAT IS THE POINT?

literature is but the shadow of good talk

consider the many ways of failing that await the poet who makes his or her own consciousness of emotions into the subject of a poem, instead of the emotion itself.

Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.

Problém se slovy spo?ívá v tom, že stahují myÅ¡lenky k zemi, pÃ…â"¢ibíjejí je na kÃ…â"¢íž pÃ…â"¢esných význam?. Ale život není o pÃ…â"¢esných významech, spíÅ¡e o jejich odstínech, o náznacích, verzích a rozporech, o propojení lásky a nenávisti, vypo?ítavosti a touhy.

Many people are so comfortable and rooted in this way of knowing reality that they are unable to engage in any meaningful dialogue, being so sure of the 'facts', and that their version of 'reality' is the true one and nothing else possibly could be.

scripts that rely on semagrams tend to have hundreds or even thousands of signs (Chinese has over 5,000).

Stát, který v??í, že není správné ?íst cizí dopisy, ?asem za?ne v??it i tomu, že jeho korespondenci také nikdo ne?te...

Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols.

symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality…

One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: "Mademoiselle de Beauvoir," he began, in an inquisitorial tone, "what do you make of Brochard who is of the opinion that Aristotle's God would be able to experience sexual pleasure?" Herbaud cast him a disdainful look: "I should hope so, for his sake," he haughtily replied.

Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,' wrote Poulain de la Barre,11 a little-known seventeenth-century feminist.

le parole fissano la verità solo dopo averla assassinata; lasciano sfuggire ciò che v'è in essa di più importante: la sua presenza.

Die Vorstellung der Welt ist, wie die Welt selbst, das Produkt der Männer: Sie beschreiben sie von ihrem Standpunkt aus, den sie mit dem der absoluten Wahrheit gleichsetzen.

A representação do mundo, como o próprio mundo, é operação dos homens; eles descrevem-no do ponto de vista que lhes é peculiar, e que confundem com a verdade absoluta.

it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view.

Perché le parole, questa precisione brutale che maltratta le nostre complicazioni?