Quotes about Interpretation
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.
— LM Montgomery
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.
— LM Montgomery
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.
— Laurence Sterne
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.
— Aldous Huxley
No verse of Scripture yields its meaning to lazy people.
— AW Pink
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.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
It is the Bible that enables us to know the Bible.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel