Quotes about Interpretation

It's dreadful what little things lead people to misunderstand each other.

I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry…and I think it's nicer…' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed… 'to look at it through poetry.

Mrs. Spencer said that my tongue must be hung in the middle. But it isn't — it's firmly fastened at one end.

Note: — One can do a great deal with appropriate smiles. I must study the subject carefully. The friendly smile — the scornful smile — the detached smile — the entreating smile — the common or garden grin.

Wilson has some fancy name for it, but I call lit macanaccady. Anything I can't analyze in the eating line I call macanaccady and anything wet that puzzles me I call shallamagouslem.

All womankind, from the highest to the lowest love jokes; the difficulty is to know how they choose to have them cut; and there is no knowing that, but by trying, as we do with our artillery in the field, by raising or letting down their breeches, till we hit the mark.

Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

No verse of Scripture yields its meaning to lazy people.

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.

This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.

Thus Judaism is based upon a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation, upon the will of God and upon the understanding of Israel.

To employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.