#interpret

Those who dare to interpret God's will must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another. ↗

— Robert Runcie

#asset #claim #dare #god #group

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#english #englishmen #exceptions #found #french

What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean? ↗

— Antonin Scalia

#halfway #interpretation #like #mean #means

However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others. ↗

— James Schuyler

#enter #however #i #intention #interpreted

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers. ↗

— Diane Wood

#constitution #debate #dynamism #end #evolution

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

#art #emotion #feeling #interpret #interpretation

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. ↗

— Joseph J. Ellis

#interpretation #change

A great number of elements in the characters’ lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. […] These characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both to the writer and the reader. When characters have their own will, their own autonomy, it gives the literary universe a greater internal mobility; it also makes the texts through which we view this world all the more open and incomplete. ↗

— Pierre Bayard

#interpretation #reading #communication

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. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#interpretation #words #education

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

— Charlotte Brontë

#interpretation #mind #soul #faith