Quotes about Interpretation

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

The method of political science is the interpretation of life its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.

Literality in satire is the condemnation by quotation.

Men are wrong to think that the blind cannot see. The truth is that they see, but differently. I would even say that they see something other.

The only wrong way to read the Bible is to not read it at all.

There's a way to preach the Bible unbiblically...You can use the Bible as the springboard for all kinds of ideas, can't you? Look around in here and find something that fits your fancy and then launch a rocket off it. People say, 'That was amazing, wasn't it? Remarkable what he got out of that.' Well of course it is because he put it in before he got it out.

What's descriptive isn't necessarily prescriptive.

The idea of monogamous same-sex relationships being acceptable to God emerges from an unwillingness to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture.

What Jerry has done, in a masterful way, is go through and select portions of the Scripture and put words in Jesus' mouth that are legitimate because they already appear in the Bible.

I know that my way of tackling a character is very different.

The Bible... provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.