Contextual Analysis Quotes

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things, but I don't view those effects as good or bad. If a context and a goal is defined, I could say if it's good or bad. But overall, I don't view things as good or bad.

The Bible, of course, is not a theology book. It is certainly not a philosophy book. So we have to derive the meaning of terms from the context in use.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

God's Word is not presented in Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, and, indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it - grasp it, that is, as a whole. Every text has its immediate context in the passage from which it comes, its broader context in the book to which it belongs, and its ultimate context in the Bible as a whole; and it needs to be rightly related to each of these contexts if its character, scope and significance is to be adequately understood.

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

Theological reflection takes place within history, but the history within which it takes place is an ongoing, open-ended process.

I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.

Contextualize the music. I really hope to do more of that.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

I think whether you are a judge on my court or whether you are a judge on a court of appeals or any court, and lawyers too - and if you're interested in law yourself, you'll be in the same situation - you have a text that isn't clear. If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn't clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I'm interested in teasing out the contemporary issues in what I'm working on, however old the piece might be, whenever I'm working on it.

The study of an idea is, of necessity, the story of many things.

Scripture is not inerrant; believers are called to interpret biblical texts in light of tradition and reason.

I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do - where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it? How can you convey its character?

The comparative strength of each piece depends entirely on circumstance; their movements are so different that it is essentially impossible to effectively compare them on anything other than a case-by-case basis.

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.

They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.