Quotes about Interpretation

The year after How to Read a Book was published, a parody of it appeared under the title How to Read Two Books; and Professor I. A. Richards wrote a serious treatise entitled How to Read a Page.

If communications were not complex, structural outlining would be unnecessary. If language were a perfect medium instead of a relatively opaque one, there would be no need for interpretation. If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical.

For a woman, language spoken is an expression of what she is feeling. For a man, language spoken is an expression of what he is thinking. A woman says what is on her heart while a man says what is on his mind.

Whatever approach you take to reading the Bible, don't let yourself become a slave to the method. Don't get so caught up in the mechanics that you miss the point.

The sum and substance of the teachings and the achievements of Christ, which may have been interpreted as miracles, were nothing more nor less than FAITH. If there are any such phenomena as miracles they are produced only through the state of mind known as FAITH! Some teachers of religion, and many who call themselves Christians, neither understand nor practice FAITH.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

No man is to be credited for his mere authority's sake, unless he can show Scripture for the maintenance of his opinion.

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: if the ones who say they believe in God cannot find anything better than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.

Tobacco, banjo playing, and dominoes do not figure in the Decalogue as recorded in the Book of Exodus. But particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Christians have been adept, and remarkably inventive, at interpreting God's commandments to cover just about anything they don't approve of. The effect, of course, is to make the surpassingly large God of the scriptures into a petty Cosmic Patrolman.