Quotes About Interpretation

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

The name one gives is inessential. What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by other name would smell as sweet.

Words are symbols representing things and ideas known to us; and these symbols do not and cannot convey the true nature of even ordinary things. Language is considered deceptive and misleading in the matter of understanding of the Truth.

Words are symbols representing things and ideas known to us; and these symbols do not and cannot convey the true nature of even ordinary things.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.

Develop convictions from your understanding of revelation, but take them no further; do not make absolute what the Bible dos not make absolute.

All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

History is written by the victors.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

First, in the witness to Jesus by the early Christians in the New Testament, they relied heavily on Old Testament "anticipations" of the coming Messiah. But second, Jesus did not fit those "anticipations" very well, such that a good deal of interpretive imagination was required in order to negotiate the connection between the anticipation and the actual bodily, historical reality of Jesus.

One compelling alternative to land theology is the recognition that Judaism consists most elementally in interpretation of and obedience to the Torah in its requirements of justice and holiness.

1. The first partner in the meeting is the text.

I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude.

The poets speak only poetry, not program, not policy, not even advocacy, only poetry. But the poetry exists in order to make available what the ideologues are unable to see and what the policy makers are unable to grasp.

truth" as an "army of metaphors." By that he meant that truth is not a given, but it is an elusive, contested act of interpretation that emerges and makes claims through many twists and turns.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

I had, in fact, long ago decided what I expected to hear from the Spirit, and when I did not hear precisely that, I had felt betrayed. Whatever else the Spirit might have been telling me at that hour, I could not hear. I was so intent on hearing only one message, the message I wanted to hear, that I was not really listening at all.

The Golden Rule is intolerable; if millions did to others whatever they wished others to do to them, few would be safe from molestation. The Golden Rule shows anything but moral genius, and the claim by which it is followed in the Sermon on the Mount -- 'this is the Law and the Prophets' -- makes little sense.

Being read is a fringe benefit, and being read with understanding is a form of grace.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.