Quotes About Interpretation

Just because an interpretation is commonly held doesn't mean it's correct.

I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have inside your head.

Yes, but I think if you look at it with a sort of gay sensibility and want everything to be positive about gay life, it could be interpreted as antigay.

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Scrutamini scripturas [Let us look at the scriptures]. These two words have undone the world.

I support any procedure that allows photographers to express themselves, whether that involves color, black and white, platinum, palladium and digital technology.

What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?

What we have done is to literalize the DeMille film while thinking that we are literalizing the biblical story!

knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called "midrash.

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith.

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world. The

The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.

Word of God" or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.

the "gift of interpretation" is considered on a par with the "gift of tongues," and indeed is thought of as the companion gift that must be sought along with tongues. An "interpretation" purports to give the content of the message just delivered in an unknown tongue, differing from a translation in that the interpreter no more understands the tongue than the speaker does.

In Paul's view, there seemed to be three principal ways in which tongues were of value: 1. In private prayer, tongues aided the speaker to praise God. 2. They let the speaker pray even at those times when he or she was not sure what to ask for. 3. And in public worship, when accompanied by another of the nine gifts, "interpretation," tongues provided a vehicle of direct communication between God and His people.

I]t invites us to think by not thinking for us; this is not to be dismissed as an absence of thought (or 'moral tone' for that matter), but as an absence full of potential presence, which the reader is invited to actively produce.

In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words.

is not to be expected that there should be agreement about the definition of any thing, until there is agreement about the thing itself.

there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.

Nevertheless, there seems good reason for adhering to the common usage, and calling (as indeed Hobbes himself does in other places) the word sun the name of the sun, and not the name of our idea of the sun. For names are not intended only to make the hearer conceive what we conceive, but also to inform him what we believe.

Since there is no difference of meaning between round, and a round object, it is only custom which prescribes that on any given occasion one shall be used, and not the other. We shall, therefore, without scruple, speak of adjectives as names, whether in their own right, or as representative of the more circuitous forms of expression above exemplified.

Our moral faculty, according to all those of its interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgements; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doctrines of morality, not for perception of it in the concrete.