Context Quotes

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

“You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...

Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.

The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.”
― Chuck Klosterman

“If the context is lost and merely bits and pieces remain from a scattered existence, only the connection of anchor points may reinstate a distorted mental balance in an upset life story. ("Lost the global story." )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.”
― Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

“When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of ‘interest’ and ‘attention’, so long as we focus on the ‘singular moments’ and the ‘appealing details’ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Desire or impassioned liking go with a demanding and ongoing quest, and therefore patience and indulgence are decisive to hitting the trail to empathizing people and finding out the right contexts in life. ( “Twilight of desire “ )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“True understanding involves more than just interpreting words at face value. It initiates us into the others’ experiences and tells us to consider their context, emotions, and nonverbal cues. ( "Lost the Global Story." )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If we want to understand its imprint, we must put silence in context. This allows us to retreat, reflect, rejuvenate, and gain redeeming strength. We escape then triviality and find depth and meaning. ("A gap of silence")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Truth is always experienced subjectively and is shaped by the context of our perceptions.
("Behind the frosted glass”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“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!”
― Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist

“Hillalum wondered what sort of people were forged by living under such conditions; did they escape madness? Did they grow accustomed to this? Would the children born under a solid sky scream if they saw the ground beneath their feet?”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“The frame, the definition, is a type of context. And context, as we said before, determines the meaning of things. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere, or from everywhere for that matter. Our point of view biases our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view.”
― Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist

“It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).”
― Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence

“We see things through the filters of our minds. Our perception is a product of our mind's interpretive framework. What we perceive is an interpretation soaked in context, memory, and partiality that arises from our conscious engagement with the world. (Is it a bird? Is it a plane?)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“More women are murdering people these days,' says Joyce. 'If you ignore the context, it is a real sign of progress.”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“After so long, you realise that knowing things doesn't especially matter very much. Knowledge with no context is meaningless. That's not the real treasure.

'Oh?' I tucked away my tools and stood. 'What is, then?'

Vale stood, too. He was quite tall, and he looked down at me with a wolfish kind of delight. He smiled, revealing those deadly fangs. The moonlight from the window glinted in his amber eyes.

I felt, all at once, like an idiot for thinking before that he didn't look monstrous. Because in this moment, with that smirk on his lips, I glimpsed the man of the legends. The monster of the whispers.

'Curiosity,' he said.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Six Scorched Roses

“Answer must be molded compatible with context, contextless answer creates only more problems.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“Consuming data with no sense of context, gives you, not awareness, but only ulcers.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“We believe we understand the real void, but do we know exactly what it is? Perhaps we think we know what space is, and based on that knowledge, we believe we understand what void is in the context of space. But what if our idea of void is wrong in the context of space as we know it?”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Everything in life, I realized, was measured in context: rich, poor, family or no family, dad or no dad, fancy or not fancy. Whether or not any of it mattered depended on the backdrop against which you measured it.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Shopgirls

“If the context is not known, it makes people mistaken something for something else completely different.”
― Maria Karvouni, The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing

“When two people talk, their words live within a shared space—shaped by trust, tone, timing, and all the unsaid things between them. Pull those words out of that space, twist them around, strip them of their setting—and to me, that feels like a betrayal. It’s not just misunderstanding; it’s a kind of violence. Literalists scare me—not because they’re wrong, but because they refuse to see beyond the surface. They flatten meaning, ignore nuance, and use language to serve their own narrow views. Context isn’t a footnote—it’s the heart of everything.”
― Renuka Goria

“When deciding upon an appropriate course of action, context is key. Whatever we decide, in any situation, is secondary to the process of rationally arriving at the answer according to the facts at hand.”
― Kai Whiting, Being Better: Stoicism for a World Worth Living In

“Without memory there's no history. Without history there's no context. Without context there is no meaning.”
― Neil Abramson, Just Life

“Everything I say and do will eventually be taken out of context.”
― Michael Palmero

“Paul is not the one who needs an update—we do, considering that the tools used for interpretation have already been updated. They can help us find where many interpretations of the same texts have varied among those who hold a high view of Scripture.”
― Sandra L. Glahn, Nobody's Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament

“We exist in multiplicity. In the eyes of our parents, we might always be the child they nurtured. To a sibling, we might be a confidant, to a colleague, a professional... . Recognising that we are different people in different contexts can be liberating. It allows us to be flexible without feeling inauthentic.”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"