Quotes About Interpretation

nothing in Nature is black or white, few solutions are clean and clear; rather, reality, and especially our models of it, possess shades of gray throughout.

A model is a simplification. It is an interpretation of reality that abstracts the aspects relevant to solving the problem at hand and ignores extraneous detail.

Success comes in an emerging set of abstract concepts that make sense of all the detail

The map is not the territory. The man is not the file.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.

the truth is JavaScript actually makes two passes over your page: in the first pass it reads all the function definitions, and in the second it begins executing your code. So

An expression is anything that evaluates to a value. 3+4

We haven't done much writing code, but we are reading and understanding code, and that can be just as good. So

The universe of words had always seemed to him a fascinating, forbidding territory, open only to a privileged few.

Creativity is discontent translated into arts.

Historians are not by and large inclined to supernatural explanations, but they are addicted to a near equivalent - 'inevitability'.

We see what we want to see. We idealize each other with our own fantasies.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who was very interested in a French philosophy called deconstruction. He advertised to me as one of deconstruction's selling points that deconstruction deconstructs itself. I couldn't help responding, if deconstruction deconstructs itself, why bother reading its long, boring books? Why not go for a jog instead, or reread one of Patrick O'Brian's tremendous tales of the sea?

True fans of the Constitution, like true fans of the national pastime, acknowledge the critical role of human judgment in making tough calls. We don't expect flawless interpretation. We expect good faith. We demand honesty.

They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it. —Martin Luther

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

when Melanchthon recalled it, although, as we have said, he was not yet in Wittenberg when it happened, and was really only recounting the recollections of others who had been there. So when he did, he was speaking in the way so many of us do when remembering things: we aren't telling an untruth but conflating things in a way that is not perfectly and literally accurate, specifically to make a larger point, and, as good fiction does, to tell a greater truth.

history comprises the subjective accounts of human beings; and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an "objective" truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective.

My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous. For example

In the process, he came to understand a crucial principle of brain function: our brain takes the incomplete information about the outside world that it receives from our eyes and makes it complete.