Quotes About Interpretation

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.

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

Knowledge is the acquiring of facts, understanding is the interpreting of facts, wisdom the application.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

To know the world, one must construct it

I portray myself as wicked, hoping I will not be regarded as wicked. But I may be wicked in the biblical sense

The best clue to what a person thinks is what he says.

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

The store of wisdom does not consist of hard coins which keep their shape as they pass from hand to hand; it consists of ideas and doctrines whose meanings change with the minds that entertain them.

In our evolution language has been the greatest single contribution to our understanding and misunderstanding

The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured'.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.