Quotes About Interpretation

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

the relationships in art are not necessarily ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of meaning.

That the analogy contains a grain of truth does not make it the less mischievous.

Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.

If you are not familiar with millibars, 1020 is high; 1000 is low; and what really matters is direction and speed of change.

All comparison is based on memory, and memory is an image based on engrams. It follows that all judgement, evaluation, is an interpretation of images, for even the present is already a memory by the time we have seized it. Therefore the unending process of finding things "good" or "not so good" is a work of imagination. Would in not be futile indeed to suppose that such judgments, that is any and all judgments, could have any absolute existence or value?

Every proverb speaketh sooth; Dreams and omens mask the truth.

Unfortunately, it is also true that the age's interests often color the past with unhistoric hues.

many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pure Sanskrit.

be ventriloquism

The dog who doesn't bark is about a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the Pariah voice, the dog's voice, that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak.

This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus.

We all bring out our own perceptions, needs, and experiences to everything we do.

Perhaps you're being oversensitive and a bit overdramatic.

One step toward defining anything is to determine what it is not. A popular approach to the word pornography is an appeal to its ancient Greek roots. This approach should be discarded. The word pornography originally meant "writing about harlots or prostitutes." But its meaning has evolved over centuries of use through dozens of different cultures. Like the Greek word gymnasium, which originally meant, "place of nakedness," the word pornography has lost its connection with the past.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you. —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it.

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

If you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate.

Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer… we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Art is like life, unique,

Behind every sentence without the author, there is a writer.