Interpretation Quotes

It [the Constitution] didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you, it says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted.

Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.

When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.

The interpretation that makes you ardent and hopeful and active and reverent is the true one.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age...

The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Once you finish a film, it doesn't belong to you anymore - it belongs to the audience to interpret it the way they feel like interpreting.

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

Many have been led astray by the Qur'an: by clinging to that rope many have fallen into the well. There is no fault in the rope, O perverse man, for it was you who had no desire to reach the top.

I like working with sound; sound and rhythm. I like the abstract more than "What does that mean?" Nobody ever says to you, "Why did you use a harmonium?" Or "What is that ringing sound that occurs here?" The questions are always "What does that song mean?" or "What were you trying to say here?"

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

Man is not to drown himself in the well of the Shastras, but he is to dive in their broad ocean and bring out pearls.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

The imagination is both interpretative and creative in nature.

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

A skilful man reads his dreams for his selfknowledge; yet not the details, but the quality.

tell me what you think it means.

We are the only beings on the planet who lead such rich internal lives that it's not the events that matter most to us, but rather, it's how we interpret those events that will determine how we think about ourselves and how we will act in the future.

If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?

Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them.

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.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution - but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

We've learned over the years that if we wanted we could write anything that just felt good or sounded good and it didn't necessarily have to have any particular meaning to us. As odd as it seemed to us, reviewers would take it upon themselves to interject their own meanings on our lyrics. Sometimes we sit and read other people's interpretations of our lyrics and think, 'Hey, that's pretty good.' If we liked it, we would keep our mouths shut and just accept the credit as if it was what we meant all along.

Records can be destroyed if they do not suit the prejudices of ruling cliques, lost if they become incomprehensible, distorted if a copyist wishes to impose a new meaning upon them, misunderstood if we lack the information to interpret them. The past is like a huge library, mostly fiction.

A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder

A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

To say the Constitution is living is to say that it's dead.

I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that's fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that's fine. And it might not be right, because I'm the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It's the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

The seeker is at liberty to extract from this treasure any meaning he likes, so as to enable him to enforce in his life the central teaching.

I never tell anyone what to take away from a movie.

All names of good and evil are images; they do not speak out, they only hint. He is a fool who seeks knowledge from them.

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

And, in general, that branch which is to act ultimately and without appeal on any law is the rightful expositor of the validity of the law, uncontrolled by the opinions of the other coordinate authorities.

Put every great teacher in a room, and they'd agree about everything, but put their disciples in there and they'd argue about everything.

I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them.

It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.

[T]he true key for the construction of everything doubtful in a law is the intention of the law-makers. This is most safely gathered from the words, but may be sought also in extraneous circumstances provided they do not contradict the express words of the law.

What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.

The clever reader who is capable or reading between these lines what does not stand written in them but is nevertheless implied will be able to form some conception.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

It's not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it's the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences.