Quotes About Interpretation

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him…. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

Four men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to expect this to happen night after night is unwise….

The most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises spontaneously in people's minds.

The world is vast, the situations that concern us are intricate, the messages are few, the biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination.

Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts.

Within the theological structure of the cults there is considerable truth, all of which, it might be added, is drawn from biblical sources, but so diluted with human error as to be more deadly than complete falsehood.

Es kommt nicht darauf an, was auf der Bühne geschieht. Sondern darauf, was das Unsichtbare Theater in deinem Kopf veranstaltet.

Es ist wie bei einem gedruckten Satz: Er besteht aus lauter verschieden aussehenden Buchstaben, die scheinbar willkürlich durcheinanderstehen. Aber trotzdem kann man ihn lesen! Und er ergibt einen Sinn. Man kann sogar drüber lachen, wenn er komisch ist. So funktioniert Buchhaim. Das ist Biblionismus.

Verwechsle nicht den Botschafter mit der Nachricht." (Storr der Schnitter)

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that's all.

When I'm actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it's a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying.

And so you try as hard as you can to separate out what you wish from what is actually there, never abandoning your ultimate dreams for the film, but trying as hard as you can to see what is actually on the screen.

This revelation about bi-planes and elephants can in turn prompt the listener to elaborate another improvisation, which will coax out another aspect of the hidden dream, and so on, until as much of the dream is revealed as possible

It's really sad that the kids today can only relate to Beethoven via a rock version of his music.

it often occurs that a work of art — even though incomprehensible — remains in the mind, and produces its effect years later, when people are apt to remark that it was not the same as when they first saw it, transferring to the object under discussion the chance in themselves.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

The doings of Sherlock Holmes are better recorded by a Watson than by another Holmes.

That's what Harold said." "Harold—

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

what is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.

I seek truth in a book and not the subject.