Quotes About Interpretation

art forgeries achieve what legitimate art accomplishes when legitimate art is most effective, provoking us to ask agitating questions about ourselves and our world.

Robert Frost quote: "Tell other people's stories as if they happened to you, and tell your own as if they happened to other people.

People familiar with the working of courtrooms know that truth and justice are only in the eye of the beholder. The best lawyers know that their job is only to convince that beholder of their version.

In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.

If you can't understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences. For example if someone is making everyone around them miserable and you'd like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.

Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain?

It may well be, therefore, that the true meaning of life is not to be found in what is objective, but in what is subjective (but still universal).

Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what someone genuinely means when they are talking. This is because often they are articulating their ideas for the first time. They can't do it without wandering down blind alleys or making contradictory or even nonsensical claims. This is partly because talking (and thinking) is often more about forgetting than about remembering

What do we see when we don't know what we're looking at?

You look at the world through a story. You can't help it.

A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind.

We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.

same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.) Then

It is because our own experience is genuinely literary, narrative, embodied, and storylike that we are so attracted to fictional representations.

It is the case, instead (and this is a genuine reversal of the presumption in question), that we directly and naturally perceive reality as personified, and then must work very diligently to strip that personification away, so that we can detect "objective reality.

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It is, perhaps, a last-resort option. Nonetheless, there are times when its application proves enlightening.

Un largo periodo de falta de libertad —de adhesión a una estructura interpretativa particular— es necesario para que se desarrolle una mente libre.

You can decide for yourself what truth there might be in that concern after reading this book. :)

that morality is relative, at best a personal "value judgment." Relative means that there is no absolute right or wrong in anything;

We process the unknown world from the bottom up. We encounter containers of information, so to speak, whose full import is by no means self-evident.

The only time /no/ ever means /no/ in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.

It is possible that you have misinterpreted the situation entirely, for reasons of which you remain fundamentally unconscious.

Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.