Felix Frankfurter Quotes

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

If a Statute make use of a Word the meaning of which is well-known at the Common Law, such word shall be taken in the same Sense it was understood at the common Law.

Remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law but to interpret and apply it

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness.

One of the challenges for lawyers can be explaining, first of all, what the legal issue is and, second, its significance. And both of those are important.

It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of "laws" to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.

The Law is not the same at morning and at night.

Whether it was a song, a person, or a story, there was a lot you couldn’t know from just an excerpt, a glance, or part of a chorus.

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

I think if you decide that any book is about Only One Thing you're probably wrong. Even if that thing is in there.

Meaning is not in things but in between them.

Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

What does it matter, if we tell the same old stories? ...Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what’s important.

The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

The beauty of Billie Holiday is that she gave every singer after her the license to interpret and perform music in ways that were unique to each of us. Her uniqueness was very much a part of the way she sang the songs, the story she wanted to tell through the songs. I didn't really have a full understanding of Billie until I left home -- until I'd lived a little, shall we say. At different seasons of my life, when I'd sing her songs or listen to her albums, I'd hear things I didn't hear before. Wherever you are in life, you'll hear different things in her songs.

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose Upon Truths lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.

I simply cannot accept that there are on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument.

It's the Point of Your View that Decides What You See - / One Man's Flop Is Another Man's Hit. / From Manners to Movies, the Picture Keeps Changing / Depending Upon Where You Sit.

And then, 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, if I read the book again today, I'd find 100 other things that I missed last time. It's a constantly changing book.

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.