Best 28 quotes in «misinterpretation quotes» category

Ideas are not dangerous. It is the deliberate or accidental misinterpretation and misapplication of them that makes them unstable and a starting point for morally-questionable behaviour.

There are photographs that I don’t take now, that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.

You just stroke me, stroke me.

An insipid voice message or an incongruent emergence from the “other” world may disrupt our whole thinking system. If we are not able to deal with the fragmentation of our self and assess the deconstruction of our identity, a corny incident could easily capsize our being. A misinterpretation of facts and expectations may perturb our awareness and unsettle our perception. When “I” and “me” don’t get along very well, the road to oneness may be very often bumpy. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)

I am not pretty; I am not ugly. I am not true, and I am not false. I am just me—a reality, a conception, and not a misinterpretation.

Then come and as we lay, beside this sleepy glade, there I will sing to you my Longfellow serenade.

. . . [A] creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. . . . My friend, the distinguished paleoichthyologist Colin Patterson of the British Museum in London, was talking about pattern cladism and how he had abandoned many of the assumptions about evolution that he had once held, including the recognition of ancestors in the fossil record. He was now only interested in the simplest hypotheses that were easily tested, such as cladograms. But, of course, taken out of context, it sounds as though Colin doubted that evolution had taken place, yet he said nothing of the sort! Colin was speaking in a kind of "shorthand" that makes sense to the scientists who understand the subtleties of the debate, but mean something entirely different when taken out of context. I was at that meeting and was stunned to read afterward about Sunderland's account of what had happened because I remembered Colin's ideas clearly and could not imagine how they could be misinterpreted. For decades afterward, Colin had to explain over and over again what he had meant, and why he did not doubt the fact that evolution had occurred, only that he no longer accepted a lot of the other assumptions about evolution that Neo-Darwinists had made. Unfortunately, Colin died in 1998 while he was still in his scientific prime, unable to continue fighting these misinterpretations of his ideas that continue to be propagated by the creationists.

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!

If we don’t readjust our perception in time, the screeching hinges in our mind may break for want of oil and our viewing angle narrow unremittingly, thus inducing blurred vision, misinterpretation and incomprehension. ( "Drunken sailor" )

It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible”—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to—wild and perverse misinterpretation.

If you play devil's advocate with political correctness, you'll get the horns - deliberate misinterpretation leading to you being fully demonized.

It is often said that I "misinterpret everything" but the truth is, I can interpret perfectly what is hidden with perfect diplomacy.

It's a waste to always act what you feel without saying it. Action is louder than words, often too loud and turns to be misinterpreted.

The passage that he had found in the book had been riddled with ambiguities and contradictions only reserved for those most valiant in overriding their legalistic forbearance into a necessary frenzy that would allow them to suitably work up a case for one side or the other on how the Law, without the possibility of misinterpretation, states If ABC, then DEF—or for the sake of acknowledging the counterargument first as a courtroom tactic, the case might also be made that the Law states the antithesis of the aforementioned If ABC, then DEF, but gives allowance within reasonable parameters for a provisional XYZ to be granted in exceptional cases. And thus, it was a matter not so much of making one’s case in a clear and logical sense, but one for the lawyers to battle out in the arena of pathos, as it was clearly the emotional pleas that could evoke a sense of sympathy in the courtroom and overturn otherwise painstaking endeavors at using the tools at hand to make pleas based upon incontrovertible facts.

Reading, seeing, and hearing happen way more often than understanding.

When merely meeting someone is ridden with angst and open to misinterpretation, is it any wonder she is so hopeless at relationships.

This whole conversation was turning into a twisted version of Abbot & Costello's Who's on First.

We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence and start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors.

We rarely get the chance to see things anew. I remember a Latin translation that caused me to fail an exam at school because one of the words, translated for us at the bottom of the page and intended to help, was invalid. I read this to mean false, null, illegal. The opposite of valid. But it was meant to be understood as invalid as in a sick person. It torpedoed my entire translation. Instead of tending to the sick, priests were being accused of fraudulence and neglecting their duties. Even though it didn't match up with the grammar, or the story, I kept on returning to that word to check, and every time I saw it only as I had done already—invalid, null, void.

There is no stress. It is a misinterpretation of a situation. Just change your perception and stress will melt away.

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

I've learned to dance with a hand in my pants.

Writers strive to create definitive statements but forget that their work is often viewed through the cracked spectacles of perception. Others can take what is written, twist it to their own agenda and present it back to the author as fact, contrary to the original intention.

Don't shed no tears, no woman, no cry.

I'm happy to be stuck with you.

Silence is a statement that is open to gross misinterpretation.

Misinterpretation is the most deadly of human sins.

Please forgive me, I know not what I do. Please forgive me, I can't stop loving you.