Quotes About Interpretation

Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.

I wouldn't have minded a rather more detailed conclusion (to Pride and Prejudice) — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.

he never knows what he's saying. He says everything, so he has to be right some of the time.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.

I am only interested in art that is in some way concerned with truth. I could not care less whether it is abstract or what form it takes.' …

When we say something about something, we make it lie there before us, which means at the same time to make it appear.

Nietzsche did track down Platonism in its most covert form: Christianity and its secularizations are thoroughly Platonism for the people.

Our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner.

All future interpretation of Greek metaphysics, including Nietzsche's, is Christian.

The ontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative Interpretation; it determines what must be the case if there can be anything like mere-aliveness [Nur-noch-leben].

El tiempo deberá ser sacado a la luz y deberá ser concebido genuinamente como el horizonte de toda comprensión del ser y de todo modo de interpretarlo (pag. 28)

Hans Christian Andersen: We co-write them. I just don't do any of the writing. I change the bits I don't like and then erase all the rest from history. I'm more like a German theatre director. Or, y'know, a German generally.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Power, it seems, is one of those terms we all understand and can explain--until asked to do so.

Nearly two thousand years ago a sage named Ben Bag-Bag insisted that students must go deeper, turning the biblical text over and over again: "Turn it over and over because everything is in it and reflect upon it and wax grey and old over it and do not leave it, for you have no better lot than that" (Abot 5:22).

Some Christian writers have argued that the plurality of elohim is a definite indication of the Trinity. This writer, however, believes this is more a result of "reading back" into the text, a conclusion in search of an exegetical base.

You mean who do I like? Oh, Mary Ellen Mark. Diane Arbus." "Arbus?" He scratched his head. "Wasn't it she who said, 'Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize'?

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

He wished he understood women better. It was a well-known fact that they did not mean half of what they said. But which half did they mean?

It is impossible," he said, "to put a label upon remembered feelings. They are colored too much by all our subsequent experiences.

Le nostre idee devono essere grandiose quanto la natura, se devono interpretare la natura stessa.

when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.

How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.