Walter Martin Quotes

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

Whatever the framers … intended, there is no reason to believe that they possessed the best insights or ultimate wisdom as to the meaning of their words for subsequent generations ... Words do not have fixed meanings.

Man’s writing has but one true sense, which is that which the Author meant when he writ it.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

It is the man determines what is said, not the words.

It all depends what you mean by.

She meant it as a compliment.

The words that are coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

And those moments that I find mind busting. Meaning like there's a word that I find in a weird place. I love the process of going to the writer and working that out, because that's just basic communication.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands. The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn’t sound so sensible in short snatches.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

There was no "me" in Alchemy. Well, phonetically there was, but that wasn't the point.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things. Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.