Quotes About Interpretation

Which is what literature is: that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter

each will form universal images according to the conditioning of his body.

those who have more often regarded with admiration the stature of men will understand by the word 'man' an animal of upright stature, while those who are wont to regard a different aspect will form a different common image of man, such as that man is a laughing animal, a feather-less biped, or a rational animal.

Physical reality is only a mirror. And whatever you define it to be; whatever you believe is most true, is what you get. So it's very important to pay attention to those beliefs and those definitions, for it is those and only those that create your physical reality experience.

Give it a positive meaning so you can get a positive result.

There is something very affirming about the idea that the narrative is the big thing, and it is not clear if it is good or bad, or if it is moving in a good or bad direction. It's just moving. You have to draw meaning from the whole.

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.

It is interesting to watch yourself on a reality show. It makes you think about the things that you say and how what you meant to convey can be so easily miscommunicated and misunderstood.

We have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.

Once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him.

Selective Biblical quotation is a favorite of leftists who interpret the Bible the same way they do the Constitution: as a Chinese menu designed to allow picking and choosing. That's because when many Democrats take the Bible as a whole, they realize how much they despise it.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

Laws, especially those of a constitutional nature like the Basic Law, which have been formulated through reasonable legislative processes, should never be freely interpreted or lightly abandoned.