Quotes About Interpretation

Furthermore, when we speak about people based on what we think, feel, or hope rather than what we observe and experience, we deprive them of their humanity. We have replaced what they are, in all their fluid validity, with our own crystallized ideas, opinions, beliefs.

A buddha recognizes that anything put into speech is never completely reliable.

By our very attempt to grasp an explanation, we leave things out.

Consciousness divides Reality. It conceptualises it, packages it, and explains it to itself. Then in our ignorance, we think it's taking readings on things 'out there.

We tend not to realise the extent to which we make up … the world, that is, the world of relative truths. We set boundaries, we make definitions. We determine what is good, what is bad, what ought to be, and what ought not to be – all out of inclinations of our mind.

It's in our very trying to define and arrange things for ourselves – trying to identify and assign meaning to things – that we end up creating a world that is ultimately meaningless.

Pat tells you something about Jolene. What do you hear as a listener? What information have you actually received? You've received information about Pat – not Jolene. We may walk away believing we have solid information about Jolene. But we don't. All we have are Pat's words about her. Perhaps you haven't even met Jolene. If you're wise, you'll withhold judgements about her. Nothing put into speech is ever completely reliable.

Say 'Kenmore Square', I insist. Kenmaw Sqway-ah. Say 'Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina.' Nothing could be finah than to be in Caroliner.' You're doing that on purpose. I'm not. I sway-ah.

With a cheery delicacy she divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious.

She started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.

An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.

They told me to just act like myself. When I said, How do I do that? they said to just have fun with it, but I'm not sure what they meant.

At least Clarissa knows I'm benign. But that is not an adjective one wants to throw around about one's spouse: This is my husband. He's benign.

The Feynman Dilemma A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny

In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.

This man, at the beginning, appears to be utterly romantic. In reality, he is often totally unrealistic. He has no idea what it is he really wants, and he has no concept of how his behavior might be interpreted. He is probably somebody with little history of reliability and dependability in other relationships.

that number is 58 percent

Muchos de nuestros descubrimientos pueden no ser de mucha utilidad, incluso puede que no sean concluyentes. Pero eso está bien. Lo que intentamos es iniciar una conversación, no tener la última palabra. Y eso significa que en las páginas que siguen puede encontrar unas cuantas cosas de las que discrepe. De hecho, nos decepcionaría que no las encontrara.

We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes .

There are two types of people in the world. There are the people who understand instinctively that the story of The Flood and the story of The Tower of Babel are the same thing, and those who don't.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It's wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It's automatic. It creates empathy.

No one can claim their particular vision of the divine as correct, if there are thousands of other 'visions' with which to compare it. And anyone who does try to claim the spotlight? Even a few decades ago, they could have started a cult. These days, they'll just get trolled online, then ignored.