Quotes About Interpretation

It's not what you look at that matters, its what you see

is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. . . . When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

The question is not what you look at…but what you see

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.

as [ale] is the liquor of modern historians,..., it ought likewise to be the potation of their readers, since every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ.

in which the captain, with great learning, proved to Mr Allworthy, that the word charity in Scripture nowhere means beneficence or generosity.

persons who suspect they have given others cause of offence, are apt to conclude they are offended;

An incident which happened about this time will set the characters of these two lads more fairly before the discerning reader than is in the power of the longest dissertation.

The world is divided into two sorts of people: those who think the world is divided into two sorts of people and those who don't.

She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text

Am I grave?', he asked. 'I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.' 'You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together.

No,' she sadly insisted—'men don't know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.

It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience.

the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced , or is still pierceable, in its vast front , by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

There is no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding