Misinterpretation Quotes

“Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, "What else could this mean?”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The text has disappeared under the interpretation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“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”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“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" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“This whole conversation was turning into a twisted version of Abbot & Costello's Who's on First.”
― Kelly Moran, Tracking You

“I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“There will be times in your life when you need to remain low key. Not everyone needs to know everything about you. Not everyone deserves to know the real you. If they want to criticise you for who they think you are, then let them make that mistake. But you’re not responsible for their thoughts.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the history.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“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.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Reading, seeing, and hearing happen way more often than understanding.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Debasish Mridha

“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.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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.”
― Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art

“You're missing the context of my thoughts. Don't misinterpret.”
― enlatia, Pandemiconium: Viral Conspiracy

“What we say doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of what we mean. Sometimes the result is sort of abstract, open to misinterpretations. We use the colors and words on our present palette when others would paint a clearer picture.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year

“. . . [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.”
― Donald R. Prothero

“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.”
― Irene Dionaldo

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

“In the forbidden zone of interpretation, the tyranny of language becomes the poisoned-tip of the bureaucratic spear.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter. One word absent from a sentence can drastically change the true intended meaning of the entire sentence. For instance, if the word 'love' is intentionally or accidentally replaced with 'hate' in a sentence, its effect could trigger a war or false dogma.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

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

“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.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I'd say you pass muster" "Past master? I'm the present master." "...Yes. Of course.”
― NisiOisiN, KATANAGATARI 1: Sword Tale

“To behave unconventionally is liable to be misinterpreted.”
― Evan Davis, Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It

“The higher-ups read into things. And they ignore sentences they don’t like.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, A Pause in the Perpetual Rotation

“And another thing can be a sensory misinterpretation of reality. For example, I used to make a lot of art projects when I was younger, so I had a stash of colored pencils. I would often look for a black colored pencil to outline everything, but it would take longer for me to find a black colored pencil, because a lot of the pencils would look dark, so I would assume they were black until I picked them out and saw the label; a colored pencil that I could mistaken to be black can be dark purple or dark brown instead of black. During those incidents, I was misinterpreting the reality of those colored pencils. That’s why one might say, ‘I thought this pencil was black, but in REALITY, it was purple.’ I suppose the other five senses might also work. For example, the human ear cannot hear at very low frequencies nor very high frequencies, and if a person is isolated in a room with no sound except for a sound that is being played at a very low or very high frequency, then that person will think that there is no sound, but in REALITY, there is. This type of misinterpretation of reality can be known as a sensory anti-reality.”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“Misread smiles become masks of betrayal, judging hearts never see laughter's echo.”
― Huzefa Nalkheda wala