Quotes About Interpretation

ART IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE MODE OF COMMUNICATION THAT EXISTS. — JOHN DEWEY, ART AS EXPERIENCE

Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.

Four questions about the glass and the water. Is it 1/2 full, 1/2 empty, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be and what did you do with the water.

she might be interested in me, or what I attempt to represent.

Ach panenkomarjá, ten život je stejnÄ› k zeÅ¡ílení krásnej. Ne že by byl, ale já to tak vidím.

All the men added together made the solid world-- they were the marbles in the jar, and women were whatever sand or water or air claimed the space left between them. That's how I saw things as a young woman, that was my women's studies . Now I've come to know that women are like vodka poured over men, who melt away like ice cubes.

People say songs are like your children, no they are like your parents. They tell you what to do, they tell you how to behave, they tell you how to misbehave, how to dress. Everything you do is directed by the songs.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

Religion to me almost like when God leaves – and people devise a set of rules to fill in the space.

how much a thing means to one man and how little it means to another ain't the right way to look at a business matter.

I've quit dressing at them, and if they saw me they wouldn't think what you want 'em to. It's funny; but we don't often make people think what we want 'em to, mama. You do thus and so; and you tell yourself, 'Now, seeing me do thus and so, people will naturally think this and that'; but they don't. They think something else—usually just what you don't want 'em to.

The reader accepts anything, no? Even the starkest nonsense.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Was wäre, wenn wir die Annahme explizit machten und konkretisieren müssten, dass alle ernst zu nehmende Kunst und Literatur, und nicht nur die Musik, auf die Nietzsche diesen Begriff anwendet, ein opus metaphysicum ist?

I don't listen to the radio to find out what's happened. I listen to it to find out how the happenings have been distorted.

I refuse to ask of the past more meaning than it can give to the present.

The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.

Bullshit is a sales pitch for an interpretation of reality that comes with any interpretation of reality. All interpretations of reality are bullshit. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullshit.

You can still tell the truth by "pointing to" an abstraction or assessment of your mind, if your intent is simply to point out your thought, rather than to make the other person believe your thought to be the "right interpretation" of reality.

general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,