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"All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation."
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"Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka."

"They don't directly listen to you.They just hear things within their minds that triggered by your words."

"One word absent from a sentence, or misinterpreted incorrectly, can change the entire meaning of a sentence. One word can change the meaning of everything. Before you believe anything about God or anybody, ask yourself how well do you trust the transmitter, translator or interpreter. And if you have never met them, then how do you know if the knowledge you acquired is even right? One hundred and twenty-five years following every major event in history, all remaining witnesses will have died. How well do you trust the man who has stored his version of a story? And how can you put that much faith into someone you don't know?"

"There's nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don't want to know it."

"If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine."

"What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home."

"All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you."

"Again, all of life presents us with two basic ways to treat events. We can either label them 'god for us' or 'bad for us.' The event is only an event. It's how we treat the event that determines what it becomes in our lives. The event doesn't make that determination - we do."

"Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved."

"In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting."
Explore more quotes by George Eliot

"The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."

"Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty."

"Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker."

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."

"A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."
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