Quotes About Subjectivity

By putting the first-person point of view in a naturalistic perspective, I believe that we may genuinely come to understand it for the first time.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man's breadth, with his heart.

The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours. That's relativity.

We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.

Isn't one man's truth another man's lie?

I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.

But when you're in something together, it's very hard to be objective and you're very subjective.

Twyla Tharp put it together from the material I wrote and recorded over my whole career. I thought it was pretty good, but how objective could I be?

Eyewitnesses could be the most unreliable. Not only did people lie, but even the truth tellers did not always get it right. Human brains had a way of filling in details that fit their own personal worldviews.

The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.

Every single one of us goes through life depending on and bound by our individual knowledge and awareness. And we call it reality. However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies, don't you think?

There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts." A

You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?

Anything means something if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition.

One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal.

quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This "peak-end

We remember the past not only as it actually happened but also in light of what is important to us in our own lives. (8)

there is nothing objectively that makes objectivity objectively true)

It's like what some Episcopalians say about themselves today: get four in a room and you'll find five opinions.

I don't mean to be a snob about anyone else's taste or to suggest that my own is worth bragging about. I don't really have taste; I have reactions to other people's. I have opinions.

Where we stand depends on where we sit. Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them.