Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art...

Art is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone will have their own interpretation.

Your life can only be as beautiful as you repeatedly interpret it to be.

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something...

When you dream, ask yourself about the energetic as well as the psychological messages.

I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the...

If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.

true.” If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy,...

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity...

Today can only be as good as you interpret it to be.

Men and women may speak the same language, but we interpret words differently.

Opportunities can become obstacles, same way obstacles can become opportunities; it all depends on how they are being interpreted by the mind of a person.

Man’s inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man. The love of God means wasted love. ‘For God and Country’ means a divided allegiance—a 50...

There are different churches because men wanted to interpret the Bible to their favour and which conflicts with the next person’s interpretation. These led to people starting different churches, that ministers what they interpret as...

Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects;...

We don’t want to give people straight answers. We’d rather they question things for themselves.

There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where...

The meaning of life is not a search—it is a choice. Meaning is not found in things; meaning is what you make of things. The world means nothing by itself. You give it all the...

The business of reading and interpreting the Bible in South Afria is a tricky one! The Bible is everywhere and in the hands of many, including the pain inflictors. ~ Mogomme Alpheus Masoga

A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.

My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that’s good to keep in mind.

Thus, though there is a psychological tendency of accepting the judge’s verdict and reasoning as expert reasoning and tinge of finality adorned to his discretely reasoned judgement, what cannot be forgotten is even judges are human...

Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.

Huge volumes of data may be compelling at first glance, but without an interpretive structure they are meaningless.

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or...

Happiness is the inevitable prize of repeated positive interpretations of one’s experiences.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn’t your pet — it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

When you wake up from a dream you have only a few precious moments before the details of the dream begin to dissipate and the memory fades.Not all dreams are significant or worth remembering.But the...

The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body’s direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body’s response to...

To anyone who is living with uncontrollable worries: Your life isn’t as bad as you think it is. It is your frequent negative interpretations of it that are making you feel that way. Try giving...

Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires

I have forgotten my umbrella.

[C]hange your thinking, your interpretation of he world, change the way you see! To change the way you see is to change the world. (50)

Is not a critic,” asks Professor Stoll, “… a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author’s meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the...

In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.

We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.

Neither Peter in his work to include Gentiles in the church nor the abolitionists in their campaign against slavery argued that their experience should take precedence over Scripture. But they both made the case that...

A very single fact could emerge into many versions of truth,depends on the number of eyewitnesses and interpretations.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter – often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter – in the eye.

You definitely can’t forget everything that happened in your past. But you can place some positive interpretations on them, so that they don’t control your present and future emotions and feelings.

The issue is not what you may be facing, rather your interpretation of it. Always think in a positive light to create a better world for yourself and others.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place,...

Religion is just an interpretation; science is another one.

Shakespeare was not a scholar in the sense we regard the term to-day, yet no man ever lived or probably ever will live that equalled or will equal him in the expression of thought. He...

The idea only true or right “meaning” would be that shared by the largest number of the best readers after repeated and careful readings over several generations, different periods, nationalities, moods, degrees of alertness, private...

A lot of people live miserably not because their lives are worse than others, but because their repeated negative interpretations of their experiences bring greater pain to their minds than their physical problems.

Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on ‘revealed truths’) literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for...