Quotes About Interpretation

History is not the past as it really was. It's the shape we give it.

As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights.

I was astonished at how much older literature can actually be read as if it were contemporary.

Piensa lo que quieras. Soy yo quien cuenta la historia.

La historia no es el pasado tal como fue realmente, sino la forma que le damos

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however, eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor.

I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.

Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.

Good and ill are one." "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right." "The way up and the way down is one and the same." "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each.

A word is used correctly when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of correctness. The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

The principle that we ought to obey God rather than man has been interpreted by Christians in two different ways. God's commands may be conveyed to the individual conscience either directly, or indirectly through the medium of the Church. No one except Henry VIII and Hegel has ever held, until our own day, that they could be conveyed through the medium of the State.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.

As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the saying of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage.

the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the object.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.

The principle that we ought to obey God rather than man has been interpreted by Christians in two different ways. God's commands may be conveyed to the individual conscience either directly, or indirectly through the medium of the Church.

The drunkard who sees snakes does not imagine, afterwards, that he has had a revelation of a reality hidden from others […]. From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.

As long as you have a male covering, were words I'd heard over and over again, and I believed them to my bones. A male covering was the key to a woman being blessed by God in ministry.

I think that artists, at a certain point, can either become defiant and say that the audience is wrong, readers don't get them, and they're going to keep doing it their own way, or they can listen to the criticism - and not necessarily blindly follow the audience's requests and advice.