Quotes About Interpretation

Sin unos ojos que lo lean, un libro contiene signos que no producen conceptos. Y por tanto, es mudo.

Gli Adepti del Velame ricordano qualcuno che sentendosi dire: Signore, lei è un ladro, mi creda!, reagisca con: Che cosa intende con 'mi creda'? Vuol forse insinuare che io sia diffidente?

Tell me what this means, Dax said. I'm a busy woman with a ship to run and a crisis to handle and I've surrounded myself with smart, dedicated people for the sole purpose of interpreting unintelligible squiggles for me.

There are always two sides to a story.

A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.

I say there is no modern evil which cannot be justified by these ancient texts; and there is nowhere in Christendom a clergy which cannot be persuaded to cite them at the demand of ruling classes.

The state might say that it had taken a year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold. What

I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can't decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn't want known outside their own coterie.

Stephen Jay Gould

The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.

Numbers may not lie, but individual perceptions of them differ.

By characterizing women as vessels of reproduction, physicians contributed to a discourse that interpreted the individual body as a sing of the health (or illness) of the social body.

Tight corsets were accused of causing birth defects and weak, unhealthy children. It is difficult to interpret these historical accounts, however, since physical and moral injuries are often conflated. The mother becomes a scapegoat for anything bad that happens to her child

The grey hair, which has spoken of old age at once to writers and doctors, means to a painter not just grey hair, but a certain grey – perhaps a grey with silver lights and warm shadows, perhaps an opaque cold grey, but a grey as different from other greys as one chord in music is different from others.

We were disciplined and obedient to authority. We realized that truth and lies were twin sisters, and that truth on earth came in thousands of different forms.

Ci sono persone che per le azioni altrui tendono sempre a trovare le ragioni più infime, e non perché sono cattive, anzi: spesso i detrattori non farebbero mai ciò di cui accusano gli altri. Le loro spiegazioni, piuttosto, vorrebbero dimostrare una certa esperienza della vita, laddove con chiarimenti che implicano pulsioni nobili passerebbero per ingenui e poco perspicaci.

Nuestro honorable sargento dominaba todas las lenguas, excepto las extranjeras.

Dad made that up just like he made up the sign over the store. He plays with words until they say what he feels. I guess that makes him a poet.

It's not visual. He's not. You know him by his work, for one thing, and that part is visual, I suppose, isn't it? The sky, moon, stars, and trees, all those exotic colors you're apt to see in birds' feathers. When you look at a painting, you don't try to visualize the artist, do you? But you know somebody painted it or it wouldn't be there.

I suppose candles are a phallic symbol, too." "Those certainly are. Just look at them. They're penis-size. They're even flesh-colored!

From each god his own way of revelation. And for each man his own way of marking the shadow which his god casts.

When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.