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533b92d
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The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.
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mind
interpretation
soul
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Charlotte Brontë |
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3c25d83
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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.
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humour
inspirational
interpretation
art
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Joss Whedon |
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a2cbbed
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...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
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history
doubt
damnable
divine-revelation
sacred-books
tyrant
new-testament
hindu
orthodox
old-testament
charles-darwin
interpretation
doctrine
hinduism
autobiography
skepticism
miracles
belief
evidence
metaphors
resurrection
punishment
revelation
atheism
hell
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Charles Darwin |
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ac95af4
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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 anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative -- the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
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escape
reading
fiction
interpretation
real-world
narrative
escapism
storytelling
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Umberto Eco |
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a01e788
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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.
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wonko-the-sane
interpretation
perspective
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Douglas Adams |
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76de685
|
"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."
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meme
interpretation
perception
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Neil Gaiman |
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a7f893a
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Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
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futility
meaning
interpretation-of-dreams
senselessness
interpretation
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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06d4003
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[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots
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interpretation
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Joseph J. Ellis |
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3f07265
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The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
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words
interpretation
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Flannery O'Connor |
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df4ac42
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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.
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interpretation
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Gregory David Roberts |
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4cc1865
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Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.
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interpretation
subconscious-mind
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0aa92bb
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Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires
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interpretation
ideas
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Richard Wright |
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ee05013
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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.
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magical-realism
interpretation
readers
stories
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David Mitchell |
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09b0d80
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Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.
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interpretation
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Joseph J. Ellis |
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9369419
|
Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).
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philosophy
interpretation
derrida
presuppositional-apologetics
postmodernism
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James K.A. Smith |