Construe Quotes & Sayings

I will not make a sonnet from
Each little private martyrdom;
Nor out of love left dead with time
Construe a stanza or a rime.

We do not suffer to afford
The searched for and the subtle word:
There is too much that may not be
At the caprice of prosody. — Joseph Auslander

The states have authority to interpret the Constitution, enforce it, and protect the people from violations of it by the federal government In the first place, there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State. — Alexander Hamilton

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). — Soren Kierkegaard

One may also inhabit the limen, the place in between realities, a gap 'between and betwixt' universes of sense that construe social life and persons differently, an interstice from where one can most clearly stand critically toward different structures. — Maria Lugones

I trust, that your readers will not construe my words to mean, that I would not have gone to a 3 o'clock in the morning session, for the sake of defeating the Nebraska bill. — Gerrit Smith

Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with church dogma must be burned without pity. — Pope Innocent III

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. — George Haven Putnam

Richard and I, along with millions of Americans - including even Joe Donnelly - believe that life is a gift from God. To try and construe his words as anything other than a restatement of that belief is irresponsible and ridiculous. — John Cornyn

Again, how will we keep them loyal? What measures can ensure our machines stay true to us? Once artificial intelligence matches our own, won't they then design even better ai minds? Then better still, with accelerating pace? At worst, might they decide (as in many cheap dramas), to eliminate their irksome masters? At best, won't we suffer the shame of being nostalgically tolerated? Like senile grandparents or beloved childhood pets? Solutions? Asimov proposed Laws of Robotics embedded at the level of computer DNA, weaving devotion toward humanity into the very stuff all synthetic minds are built from, so deep it can never be pulled out. But what happens to well-meant laws? Don't clever lawyers construe them however they want? Authors like Asimov and Williamson foresaw supersmart mechanicals becoming all-dominant, despite deep programming to "serve man. — David Brin

Science turns whatever it studies into a natural process which is not affected by thinking, because thought is the capacity to construe the world in a variety of ways, and how human beings act depends on these unpredictable constructions. Human conduct thus lacks even the regularity found in the natural world. — Kenneth Minogue

Masculinity is a terrible problem, as we construe it and shape it. — Susan Griffin

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. — Trevanian

But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. — William Shakespeare

The 'Trinity' resembles nothing but the perpetuation of the Aryan heritage of the 'Trimurti' and 'Trismegistus', where conformal mapping is applied to guarantee the preservation of local angles between lines even though the final shape and its curvature are molded anew.
After all, sculpturing gods is precisely that what Polytheists do.
Numbers are modeled using mathematical relations so begin to construe.
It is manifested nowadays in the Pauline Christian and Jew. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now," she said. "Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing. — Don DeLillo

I do most sincerely believe that ethical behavior as we best construe it ought to be followed by us throughout our lives, even on the last day of life, and that if we have made a bad or even evil choice we are not barred (or excused) thereby from continuing to live the last moments or years given to us in whatever way we consider to be most right. — William T. Vollmann

There is no word or action but may be taken with two hands,
either with the right hand of charitable construction, or the sinister interpretation of malice and suspicion; and all things do succeed as they are taken. To construe an evil, action well is but a pleasing and profitable deceit to myself; but to misconstrue a good thing is a treble wrong,
to myself, the action, and the author. — Joseph Hall

[T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it. — Tyler Burge

One of Lucy's admirers took to her, apparently."
"Took to her?" echoes William, his own feelings for Sugar causing him to construe the phrase benignly.
"Yes," said Bodley "With her own riding crop."
"Beat her very severely."
"Particularly about the face and mouth."
"I understand all the fight's gone out of her now."
"Well, as you can imagine," he says. "Madam Georgina doesn't have high hopes. Even if she's willing to wait, there will be scars."
Ashwell, eyes downcast, is picking at the lint on his trousers. "Poor girl," he laments.
"Yes," smirks Bodley. "How are the fighty maulen. — Michel Faber

This uncovered a number of basic features of our thought processes: that the mind deploys a set of rival frames that can construe even the most plodding everyday event in more than one way; that a frame for thinking about a change of location in real space can be metaphorically extended to conceptualize a change of state as motion in state-space; and that when the mind conceives of an entity as being somewhere or going somewhere, it tends to melt it down to a holistic blob. — Steven Pinker

Most gay men did not speak out against anti-gay policing so openly, but to take this as evidence that they had internalized anti-gay attitudes is to ignore the strength of the forces arrayed against them, to misinterpret silence as acquiescence, and to construe resistance in the narrowest of terms - as the organization of formal political groups and petitions. — George Chauncey

[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution. — Alexander Hamilton

And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative. — Neal Stephenson

[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark. — Donna Tartt

What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world. — Marcella Hazan

The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

If evidence-based policy is to do its job then, it is best to construe evidence widely enough to cover all the facts without which you will not have a good argument. — Nancy Cartwright

We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone - our parents, teachers, analysts - hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we can become undeaf, unblind, and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meaning in the new book of our existence. — Sidney M. Jourard

Men may construe things, after their fashion / Clean them from the purpose of the things themselves
-Cicero — William Shakespeare

What is then the central idea of transcendental philosophy? It is to construe each object of science as the focus of a synthesis of phenomena rather than as a thing in itself. And it is to accept accordingly that the very possibility of such objects depends on the connecting structures provided in advance by the procedures used in our research activities. Thus something is objective if it results from a universal and necessary mode of connection of phenomena. In other words, something is objective if it holds true for any (human) active subject, not if it concerns intrinsic properties of autonomous entities. (...)

From a transcendental standpoint, the structure of a scientific theory is nothing less than the frame of procedural rationalities that underpin a certain research practice (and that, conversely, were constrained by the resistances arising from the enaction of this practice). — Michel Bitbol

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. — Thomas Carlyle

I'm serious when I'm talking to the press because I'm always on guard because I never know what you're going to ask and I never know how you're going to construe my answer, so I try to maintain a pretty even pace when I'm speaking with the media. — Ashton Kutcher

I don't think this is a situation where you can say that Congress was avoiding any mention of the tax power. It'd be one thing if Congress explicitly disavowed an exercise of the tax power. But given that it hasn't done so, it seems to me that it's - not only is it fair to read this as an exercise of the tax power, but this court has got an obligation to construe it as an exercise of the tax power if it can be upheld on that basis. — Donald Verrilli Jr.

Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives. — Saint Teresa Of Avila

So a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical events in certain ways. And at that depth we have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force. These concepts encourage the mind to unite events that have nothing in common in terms of what they look like, smell like, or feel like, yet they obviously matter to the mind a great deal. They are so pervasive that some philosophers consider them to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life, and in chapter 4 I will show how they saturate our science, our storytelling, our morals, our law, even our humor. — Steven Pinker