Quotes About Interpretation

Browning: 'Justinian's Pandects only make precise / What simply sparkled in men's eyes before'.

when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they're much more tricky than violins.

I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.

The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?

He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.

Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks.

I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all.

We have art, Nietzsche says, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

We are not just passive receptors sponging up a flow of images and information. Perception involves organizing stimuli and data into comprehensible units. In a word, perception is itself an act of selective editing.

The very nature of perception makes it a predominantly subjective experience.

Personal Knowledge. The two words may seem to contradict each other: for true knowledge is deemed impersonal, universally established, objective. But the seeming contradiction is resolved by modifying the conception of knowing.

Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever's already going on both inside and outside one's head.

Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map—and not the only map.

these remarkable mushrooms produce, in addition to spores, meanings in human minds.

Science has trouble with this interpretation, however, because, whatever the perception is, it can't be verified by its customary tools. It's an anecdotal report, in effect, and so has no value. Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too. But it's worth pointing out that there are cases

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.

I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist.

In art, the obvious is a sin.

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

I believe the scripture says that being gay is a sin.