Quotes About Interpretation

Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato's cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes me.

The arts are not frosting but baking soda.

A film is a system, not of meanings, but of signifiers.

Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.

Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.

When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener.

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul's interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.

I myself am more ready to distort a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one. [A]

To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid. And

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry.

Da más quehacer interpretar las interpretaciones que dilucidar las cosas; y más libros se compusieron sobre los libros que sobre ningún otro asunto: no hacemos más que entreglosarnos unos a otros. El mundo hormiguea en comentadores; de autores hay gran carestía. El

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.

reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.

I believe I... offended them in some way. I don't know how. I think my English is not as good as it needs to be in certain situations.' 'It sounds excellent to me.' He sighed. 'That is the problem perhaps. If it was worse, there would be an expectation of...' He laboured silently, then let the sentence roll back down the mountain. 'There would not be the automatic expectation of shared understanding.

but that German sounds like old clergymen vomiting.

De todos modos, nosotros no vemos nada, no vemos más que miradas, no un lugar sino un gesto, y siempre el gesto de las manos, las manos cerradas, las manos que se abren, las manos abiertas del todo.

other hand, any act constitutive of signification

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it.