When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Obama’s policies have been approximately the same as Bush’s, though there have been some slight differences, but that’s not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush’s policies.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

Swimming has its educational value – mental, moral, and physical – in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

I had a C-section, and I found it fascinating. I didn’t find it a sacrifice, and I didn’t find it a painful experience. I found it a fascinating miracle of what a body can do.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

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

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Being is the great explainer.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. ‚A miracle a minute‘ would not be a bad slogan for God.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

My favorite mode of transport is hot-air ballooning. It’s so graceful to be blown by the wind, to go where the wind takes you.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

Often, in the real world, it’s not the smart that get ahead but the bold.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

A person hears only what they understand.