Quotes About Interpretation

All history is contemporary history.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Vreunul ar fi considerat-o femeie privit? prin sticl? de micÅŸorare, iar altul feti?? cu privire de adolescent?. Necunoscând-o, te întrebai dac? e un progres uimitor sau o întârziere lamentabil?.

Verdad es; por eso se dijo que uno piensa el bayo y otro el que lo ensilla

La boca de la Nela, estéticamente hablando, era desabrida, fea; pero quizás podía merecer elogios, aplicándole el verso de Polo de Medina: «es tan linda su boca que no pide».

The Jew cannot accept the New Testament since it is the words of one man intended to undo what the Creator had shared with all of His children.

Good" and "bad" describe the subjective feelings we have toward semothing; the words "true" or "false" deal with reality, regardless of our feelings.

Michelangelo's genius was in allowing the viewer to see a great deal—in order not to show what is best left secret, except to the knowledgeable few. In other words, he put in so many trees that we cannot see the forest.

In fact, the Latin root of the word literacy is the same as for the word intellect: leggere, "to read." The source for the word intellectual also gives us its true meaning: inter-leggere, "to read between." An intellectual is defined by an ability to read between the lines, to analyze and to think critically, to understand things on many levels at the same time.

Very often, the title given to an artwork is the key to unlocking its hidden meanings. For

In The Last Judgment, just as Mary is turning away from the severe judgment of Jesus, there is a deeper meaning: Michelangelo is symbolically turning away from the Church as well.

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Women are books, and men the readers be...

who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.

If "good" is not necessarily good, and "bad" not necessarily bad, what is "small"?

In other words, knowledge and experience do not necessarily speak the same language.

Communist Party meetings into an opinion, as if he were standing in for another's view, perhaps at one remove from what actually happened, which he remembers having once been told is the true significance of having, in the ancient Greek polis, an opinion,

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.

all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language.

I would encourage subtlety. Nabokov's bubble gum or Munro's water over Dumbo's magic feather.

The work is the death mask of its conception.

The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.