Quotes about Interpretation
I'd have to listen to somebody - artist or shoe clerk. And the artist is more entertaining because he knows less about what he is trying to do.
— William Faulkner
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
— William Golding
What's in a book is not what the author put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.
— William Golding
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
— William Hazlitt
Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.
— William James
a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
— William James
There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive.
— Henry Ward Beecher
To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and thorns in the flesh were religious experiences to Judas Iscariot, the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.
— Leonard Hodgson
When there's something in the Bible that churches don't like, they call it legalism.
— Leonard Ravenhill
When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.
— Lewis Carroll
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.
— CS Lewis
Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.
— Michelangelo