Interpretive Quotes & Sayings

When science starts to be interpretive
it is more unscientific even than mysticism. — D.H. Lawrence

There are situations of course that leave you utterly speechless. All you can do is hint at things. Words, too, can't do more than just evoke things. That's where dance comes in again. — Pina Bausch

I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated ... now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort. — Fred Ritchin

Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli. — Harvey Mansfield

Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor described in the first essay in this book, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you're dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse. — David Graeber

Here's a helpful hint: If you nod, I can't see it. Or head shakes. Or shrugs. Or middle fingers. Or interpretive dances. When I ask you a question, you need to actually speak. — Emma Scott

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. — Clifford Geertz

I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed. — Kiersten White

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions. — Zadie Smith

We all see the same thing, but interpretive it differently. — Sukant Ratnakar

We must recognise - both Muslims and non- Muslims, that the Koran is a text. We need human engagement with that text, so we have to understand that the rulings and the legal rulings are produced are channelled through the human mind, it's an interpretive act of a human being engaging and interacting with a text producing legal results. Because of that it's susceptible to flaws, it is not perfect. Nobody has perfect access to the divine will. — Mark Durie

Acknowledging the interpreted status of the gospel should translate into a certain humility in our public theology. It should not, however, translate into skepticism about the truth of the Christian confession. If the interpretive status of the gospel rattles our confidence in its truth, this indicates that we remain haunted by the modern desire for objective certainty. But our confidence rests not on objectivity but rather on the convictional power of the Holy Spirit (which isn't exactly objective). [pg. 51] — James K.A. Smith

Thus 2t Grams confronts us with the same interpretive dilemma as the one in The Wings of the Dove: is the suicidal sacrificial gesture a true ethical act or not? In contrast to Wings, the answer here is yes: there is no narcissistic staging of one's death at work when Paul shoots himself, no manipulative strategy of using one's death as a gift destined to secretly sabotage what it appears to make possible. — Slavoj Zizek

Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried. — Ken Wilson

I think we begin to lose the ability to read in the deepest, most interpretive ways because were not kind of calming our mind and just focusing on the argument or the story. — Nicholas G. Carr

It is an essential part of the interpretive work that it should keep in step with fluctuations between love and hatred, between happiness and satisfaction on the one hand and persecutory anxiety and depression on the other. — Melanie Klein

PEOPLE WILL STOP ASKING QUESTIONS IF YOU ANSWER BACK IN INTERPRETIVE DANCE. - T-SHIRT — Darynda Jones

There was an abyss between myself and my love. I could not interpret the voiding distance. I supposed later that my attempts at interpretation of the abyss between myself and my love, or otherwise put, my love and my love, were themselves partially successful interpretive gestures.
I also realized that the abyss came about on account of the very account that I was loving. I assumed that interpretation would inscribe a course for the two things, my love and my love, to seek out and find each other. — Brandon Brown

Privileged people can fall into the trap of universalizing experiences and laying them across other people's experiences as an interpretive lens. — Matt Chandler

Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature. — T.C. Boyle

As you wish. But I'd like to change the pace a little. You know, my throat is sore from talking so much. So, what would you think if I tell you about the Sullens through interpretive dance? Honestly, I'm quite good at it, and I usually charge admission, or at the very least ask for a box of treats. But for you, tonight's performance it's on the house. — Stephen Jenner

As part of our interpretive task, then, we must distinguish between kingdom values and cultural values within the biblical text. With every change in our culture we have to reevaluate our interpretation of Scripture to determine what our perspective should be. At — William J. Webb

Experience informs intuition. But it does more than that: Experience sets the frame within which we analyze and interpret what we perceive. You would no doubt expect, for instance, that the "wild child" raised by a pack of wolves would interpret the world from a perspective that differs substantially from your own. Even less extreme comparisons, such as those between people raised in very different cultural traditions, serve to underscore the degree to which our experiences determine our interpretive mindset. — Brian Greene

We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion. — James K.A. Smith

Quigley (to Duane): My business is not your business, whether you ask after it in Tainish or interpretive dance. — Ashley Cope

When they are performing in front of the public, they ought to have a sensation that's relatively easy, if the technical and the interpretive work was done before. — James Levine

Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this. Realizing this can put our "analyzer" on hold, our interpretive mind on "ga-ga" and our hearts on breathless. — Antero Alli

Old foot trails may be neglected, back-country ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective services inadequately staffed, but the administrators know from long experience that millions for asphalt can always be found; Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere - particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry - they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started. — Edward Abbey

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form. — Steven Spielberg

Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice. — Patricia Hill Collins

Being an actor all of my life is kind of a collaborative, social form of interpretive art. Sitting down with a blank page every day by yourself is a different feeling. — Michael Beck

And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive. — Katey Sagal

Heard Ori Kam and was deeply impressed with his achievements as a violist. His technical and interpretive skills are truly unique. I see a great future for him. — Itzhak Perlman

The interpretive element of 'Lost' - the fact that you immediately need, as soon as the episode is over, to seek out a community of people to express your own thoughts about it, understand what they thought about it and form an opinion - that's the bread and butter of the show. — Damon Lindelof

There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems. — Gus Van Sant

I love math because there's always a right answer. It's not interpretive; it's not subjective. There is a correct destination, even if you have to hack through confusing parts to get there. That's not always true in life. — Emery Lord

Who is Mike Judge? Let me think. The only way I could possibly answer that question would be in a nonverbal fashion. I think I could do an interpretive dance that would answer that question for you. — Mike Judge

Despite the proliferation of personal storytelling in recent years, and the shift in social conditions that has facilitated these stories being told and heard, there are still certain stories that cannot be told - either because we have no language with which to articulate them or because there is no interpretive community to hear and understand them. These stories become, instead, secrets and lies - stories that signal social isolation and disempowerment rather than connection and strength. One such story within contemporary culture, as the epigraphs from Dorothy Allison and Victoria Brownworth suggest, is the story of class - a story that often only becomes tellable as a lie, joke, or dirty secret. This is especially the case with the category of "white trash. — Annalee Newitz

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form. — Clint Eastwood

I want to woo you with food now that I've wooed you with words, song, and the magic of my interpretive dance. — Stacey Jay

Truth.
In a court of law it is little more than an interpretive tool, in reality, there are no absolutes in life, and any truth will change over time, at the end of the day, if it hurts its bad if it doesn't hurt its good, and truth sort of lurks in between those two extremes. — Steve Merrick

And there it is! Bravo! I knew it was only a matter of time before Byron realized he had an audience. That man is simply incapable of keeping his shirt on when there are spectators. One Christmas Eve, he stripped his shirt off right in the middle of the choir's rendition of Oh Child of Bethlehem. Coincidentally, the next song was Come Let Us Adore Him and the imbecile actually launched into some interpretive dance. — Kirt J. Boyd

The ancient voices that speak in Scripture evoke an ongoing dialogue that requires our active participation. Their sacred conversation about life in God's presence begs to be continued among believers today, for the fact of the matter is, the Bible is not self-interpreting. It is a living word through which God continues to meet us and speak to us in our own particular historical moment, and thus it demands to be newly interpreted for new historical situations. And interpretation is not simply reiteration of the text, repeating what was said before, but the hard work of bringing it into our own time and place. So every new generation of believers must join the interpretive conversation as it experiences the living God in relation to new circumstances. — Frances Taylor Gench

[I]ndividual readers may conceivably choose (or be led) to regard a given text as literary in cases where such a response is not shared by others, but until their individual responses lose their idiosyncratic nature by being adopted by a larger interpretive community, such responses will be regarded as being to a greater or lesser degree aberrant, and the offender will be regarded as lacking in good taste or good sense or both. — Patrick O'Neill

To be sure, all translation is interpretation. ... Be that as it may, functional-equivalence translations, which presume that ambiguity, multivalence, and contradiction are by definition not part of the Bible, take far more creative and interpretive license than formal ones in eradicating those features. In so doing, they too often try to make the Bible into something it's not. — Timothy Beal

The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection. — Richard Tarnas

I don't know how to explain it."
"Try words. If that doesn't work, we'll move on to interpretive dance. — Devon Monk

Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive. — Elliott Erwitt

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective. — Umberto Eco

Truth be told, my head was spinning so much that the car could have been doing interpretive dance in a lilac tutu and I might not have noticed. — Jim Butcher

Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive. — Eugene H. Peterson

So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a "rational" or "realistic" view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy. — David Bentley Hart

Acting is mostly interpretive. They use different parts of you, and different sides of you, and different so-called talents. — Mick Jagger

A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing. — Oliver Harris

If I gave up sarcasm that would leave interpretive dance as my only way of communicating. — Michael Robotham

When I started out, I was absolutely awful, I had no voice, I didn't have a lot of stage presence and most of the interpretive intensity that I brought to the experience was actually terror. — Jimmy Webb

In addition to the interpretive frameworks of the mythological (classical-Greek), the theological (Medieval-Christian), and the existential (modern-European), would it be possible to shift our framework to something we can only call cosmological? Could such a cosmological view be understood not simply as the view from inter-stellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view? — Eugene Thacker

The Court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people's decision to give Congress '[a]ll legislative Powers' enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them. — Antonin Scalia

The key difference between a geek and a critic is that a
critic digs deep and tries to get behind the surface of things,
for better or worse, while a geek is interested in his own hedonism,
the thrill of discovery.A geek is expansive and associative
and doesn't necessarily care what a film or a scene 'means'. It's
the difference between the encyclopaedia and the scholar. A
critic likes an interesting association, a nice phrase; the geek
admires the beau geste, a pulpy story and its codes of honour
taken seriously.
Tarantino rather combines those two roles. He is encyclopaedic
but also interpretive. He is a human Rolodex of
credits. His films are like stuffed overnight bags breaking at the
seams. The Handel of filmmakers, he takes the whole of
cinema as his resource. But he also provides new meanings,
new interpretations of old moments by the way he recontextualizes
them. — D.K. Holm

As Gazzaniga put it, these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes. — David Eagleman

The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage. — August Wilson

Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet. — Umberto Eco

Directive design gives an either/or choice, similar to a traffic sign. Interpretive design allows for personal choice, in the same way symbolism allows for individual meaning. — Maggie Macnab

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator. — Laurence Olivier

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature. — Paul De Man

You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there. — Clive Davis

Would it help if I performed an interpretive dance while I said the words? — Chris Cannon

They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard. — Haruki Murakami

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me. — Clint Eastwood

It seems to me that an often quiet, but often palpable presiding image here ... is the interpretive absorption of the child or adolescent whose sense of personal queerness may or may not (yet?) have resolved ... Such a child - if she reads at all - is reading for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer. — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Nineteenth-century print culture shared with the Protestantism that sparked it a democratizing impulse rooted in the ideology of the priesthood of all believers. In the vastly expanded world of print this impulse led to what one might call a priesthood of all readers, a situation ripe for religious turmoil rooted in interpretive chaos. — Matthew Hedstrom

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

Thus when an interpretation of the world, an ideology, for example, claims to explain everything, one thing remains inexplicable, namely, the interpretive system itself. And with that, every claim to completeness and finality fails. — Paul Watzlawick

It is a sound interpretive rule ... that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. — Robert Higgs