Quotes about Interpretation

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

There are two answers to every question - God's answer and everybody else's - and everybody else is wrong when they disagree with him.

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.

Almost anything can be funny if said the right way - but it has to be said the right way.

He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.

Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.

The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of man, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus—they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.

Facts in our day are not the same as the facts in the time of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. But the principles by which these facts are interpreted have not changed, for common sense remains essentially the same throughout the ages.

Freudanism interprets man in terms of sex; Christianity interprets sex in terms of man.

Protestant commentaries, I discovered, were also particularly interesting because Protestants have spent more time on Scripture than most of us.

I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

The people that usually have the most trouble with my books are the ones that pick them apart from a theological point of view.