Interpretation Quotes

In every given circumstance, only your repeated interpretations of it will determine whether it breaks you or makes you.

~ Hafiz

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

~ Hafiz

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

~ Hafiz

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

~ Hafiz

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 your life some positive meanings on a regular basis and see how good your life becomes.

~ Hafiz

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.

~ Hafiz

The Coin of Life example: Say you have a coin with heads on one side and tails on the other side. One side would mean good and the other bad, based on your interpretation or bet of which side of the coin represents a win for you. However, you can't decide the outcome and the coin flips many times throughout your life. Finding balance is flipping the coin in such a way that neither of the sides is of greater importance to you, but if the coin lands on the middle bit, you realize that the space between what you consider good or bad is so small and the probability of landing there is also incredibly small without continuous practice. However, no matter the outcome, you choose to accept the coin as it is, with both sides, and appreciate the importance of both in your life. For the coin of life has meaning and value no matter what side it lands on. It's each individual's choice whether to bet on the outcome or not, but ultimately your coin of life will be spent somehow.

~ Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache

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.

~ Steven Redhead

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

~ David Mitchell

I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

~ Douglas Adams

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There’s presentation and there’s interpretationand they’re so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult.

~ Garth Stein

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

~ Pamela Cummins

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 I created, but rather as something that we made together.

~ Orson Scott Card

Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ( Waiting for the pieces to fall into place )

~ Erik Pevernagie

I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.

~ Julian Darius

Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.

~ Ernst Cassirer

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, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

~ D.h. Lawrence

Have you thought about what it means to be a god? asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

~ Neil Gaiman

The individualism of the Romantic theory of interpretation attempts to abstract the individual from his historical context by presenting him with the ideal of presuppositionless understanding; a truer theory of interpretation, which does not seek to elide the historical reality of the one seeking understanding, sets the interpreter himself within tradition. What we understand when we seek to understand the writings of the past is borne to us by tradition. Understanding is an engagement with tradition, not an attempt to escape from it.

~ Andrew Louth

My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture. I have great respect for orthodoxy, but my reverence for inspiration is far greater. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God. I never thought it to be any very great crime to seem to be inconsistent with myself; for who am I that I should everlastingly be consistent? But I do think it a great crime to be so inconsistent with the word of God that I should want to lop away a bough or even a twig from so much as a single tree of the forest of Scripture. God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

~ Richard Wright

Influencing is just not about listening and speaking, it’s the game of interpretation.

~ Harrish Sairaman

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

~ John Locke

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

~ George Orwell

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 today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

~ Susan Sontag

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

~ Susan Sontag

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 right.

~ Unarine Ramaru

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 with a fallibility in veins and to err is but human, hence placing  complete dependence on judicial reasoning also would be a folly, but it can be accepted as  a workable hypothesis, in my opinion.Further only concrete strands of tested reasoning and principles drawn from those concrete raison d’être , can be considered as one of the ingredient in concrete law making.

~ Henrietta Newton Martin

The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.

~ Stephen Shore

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

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

~ Deborah Curtis

When the locus of evaluation is seen as residing in the expert, it would appear that the long-range social implications are in the direction of the social control of the many by the few.

~ Carl R. Rogers

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

~ Sara Sheridan

The interpretation of dreams is a great art.

~ Paracelsus

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

~ Oliver Stone

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

~ Johan Huizinga

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

~ Oliver Stone