Individual Understanding Quotes

No man … ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

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

At the end of the day, you know yourself best.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates.

I have intentions as a writer, but people - when they're listening to a track - will take from it what they interpret.

I always hate explaining away songs, because for me they mean something, and for other people, they'll mean something absolutely different.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Everyone gets meaning in different ways.

It is essential that we understand people for who they are as individuals and not the public perception of them or their family and past.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

Perception of a state is not the state.

But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.

You, and you alone, decide what something means to you. Yet this is a decision that most people make based upon past feelings, experiences, understandings, or future fears. None of this has anything to do with what is going on right here, right now.

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.

I like to interpret 'Call me a River', as if I'm saying, 'Now you're telling me you love me after all that, and I'm telling you to shove off.' That's my interpretation. But I would never 'say' that because somebody else might interpret the song in another way.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

Nobody sees the same movie. I'm sure there are people who saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and thought "Finally a gay movie about men who really care about each other. Thank God!" That's not what I saw necessarily but I don't think any two people see the same movie.