#Interpretation Quotes

“But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.”

“My meaning in saying he is a good man, is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.”

“Ha. "Against my will I am sent to bid you come into dinner." There's a double meaning in that. -Benedick (Much Ado)”

“A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit; How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!”

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

“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.”

“We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours.”

“One must be an inventor to read well.”

“The meaning of poetry has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not under control.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.”

“Take it in what sense thou wilt.”

“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history isto be read and written.”

“We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.”

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.”

“If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.”

“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.”

“How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life-it is your interpretation of what is happening.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events - how we interpret them - that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.”

“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.”

“a good reader makes a good book”

“History should be written as philosophy.”

“Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise for interpreting laws is almost always to corrupt them.”

“[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.”

“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.”

“I would just be constantly writing all these zingers - like, 'Burn. That would really get her.' And I know people are going to obsess over who it's about, because they think they have all my relationships mapped out. But there's a reason there are not any overt call-outs in that song. My intent was not to create some gossip-fest. I wanted people to apply it to a situation where they felt betrayed in their own lives.”

“Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.”

“The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”

“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.”

“Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem.”

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

“How strangely is antiquity treated! To answer some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.”

“The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.”

“All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered so as to fit human rights.”

“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.”

“When an instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I prefer that which is safe and precise.”

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

“I saw a sign: "Rest Area 25 Miles". That's pretty big. Some people must be really tired.”

“It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.”

“..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.”

“The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.”

“The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing -- and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality.”

“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.”

“Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.”