John Selden Quotes

You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say "God is love" they will claim that you are taking things out of context!

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

No word is absolutely wrong or dirty or insulting. It all depends upon context and intention.

Sometimes, when I do certain looks, I don't want the intention to be taken out of context or expressed in the wrong way.

We read the whole Bible, cover to cover, over and over again... It wasn't that we read selective parts of the Bible. It was that we interpreted it in this very selective way.

Text without context is pretext.

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.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

Love has various lodgings; the same word does not always signify the same thing.

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

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

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

Once upon a time, a fisherman went out to sea. He caught many fish and threw them all into a large bucket on his boat. The fish were not yet dead, so the man decided to ease their suffering by killing them swiftly. While he worked, the cold air made his eyes water. One of the wounded fish saw this and said to the other: "What a kind heart this fisherman has- see how he cries for us." The other fish replied: "Ignore his tears and watch what he is doing with his hands.

The information was correct but the interpretations were not.

We don't want anybody to come off half-cocked and make a decision about what we're only in the middle of doing, right? So if there's shots of me out there, then somebody's going to say, "Oh, that's not the right way. That's not this and that." It has to be seen in context.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.

Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.

Everything I think in life is about context and intention.

[The Bible] has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.

Take it in what sense thou wilt.

You have to see it on a broader level. But you also have to activate it properly.

Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our judgment and reason. . . .

People will speculate about what they want, but that is not my intention.

Every single line means something.