Interpretation Quotes

“I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“You can put it another way, of course; you always can.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”
― Don DeLillo

“It’s so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There’s presentation and there’s interpretation
and they’re so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“The Bible is a supernatural book and can be understood only by supernatural aid.”
― A.W. Tozer, Man - The Dwelling Place Of God

“When you wake up from a dream you have only a few precious moments before the details of the dream begin to dissipate and the memory fades.

Not all dreams are significant or worth remembering.

But the ones that are . . . happen again.

So, wait for the dream to return. And never be afraid. Instead, consider it an opportunity to learn something profound and possibly wondrous about yourself.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“Don't interpret anything too much. This is time waster number 1.”
― Dee Dee Artner

“The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.”
― Jean Giono, An Italian Journey

“He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Theologians and other clerks,
You won't understand this book,
-- However bright your wits --
If you do not meet it humbly,
And in this way, Love and Faith
Make you surmount Reason, for
They are the protectors of Reason's house. ”
― Marguerite Porete

“The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.”
― Stephen Shore, Ed.D.

“The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.”
― Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“A very single fact could emerge into many versions of truth,
depends on the number of eyewitnesses and interpretations.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.”
― Jill Lepore

“There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.”
― Bones The Doctor in the Photo

“To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.

Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted.”
― William A. Dembski

“[...] it is safer to wander without a guide through an unmapped country than to trust completely a map traced by men who came only as tourists and often with biased judgement. ”
― Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Gods and Heroes of the Celts

“Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality.”
― Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, Filsafat dan Praktik Pendidikan Islam Syed M. Naquib Al-Attas

“The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.”
― Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

“The philosopher is lacking who interprets the deed and does not merely transpose it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Opportunities can become obstacles, same way obstacles can become opportunities; it all depends on how they are being interpreted by the mind of a person.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Watchwords

“We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It's not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama."

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“The business of reading and interpreting the Bible in South Afria is a tricky one! The Bible is everywhere and in the hands of many, including the pain inflictors. ~ Mogomme Alpheus Masoga”
― Gerald O. West, Reading Otherwise: Socially Engaged Biblical Scholars Reading with their Local Communities

“It’s all true, I suppose... But it’s all wrong.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“In the judiciary, judges do not adhere to the Constitution; they adhere to their interpretation; thus, the judiciary remains in a state of disaster.”
― Ehsan Sehgal