Quotes About Subjectivity

The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information... [but] it cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. So, in brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us... the scientific worldview contains of itself... not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination.

Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine.

The scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order. But it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.

You cannot be other than selfish, for you cannot observe, perceive, or be other than from your perspective of self. All points of Consciousness, even one-celled organisms, perceive. And they do so from the ever-changing selfish perspective that they currently hold.

We all see the world through the prism of our identity.

Ik geloof niet in objectieve vaststellingen. Oneindig samenspel van menselijke wisselwerkingen.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily--perhaps not possibly--chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

O young artist, you search for a subject—everything is a subject. Your subject is yourself, your impressions, your emotions in the presence of nature.

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.

How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves! (15 September 1854)

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

The past depends on the angle from which it is seen and from which it has been lived

Do not ever expect that anything applies completely to one person.

L]et them be their own Rorschach tests[.]

The waking world isn't outside and separate from our mind. It's brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.

Soteriological concepts are like aesthetic concepts in this respect. They're always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the communities of practice and thought in which they figure.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

There is also an artistic element which is lead by the film maker. Issues of what is reality and objectivity are as always relevant as someone is going to edit the film.

Your relationship to a film, and to cinema, is very much determined by yourself, so what is relevant is you.

I'm particularly interested in how you can't rely on your own perception.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

Every person's remembering will be different. That engagement is important, I think.

The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question, 'Does it hurt?' or 'What were you thinking about just now?' The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one's life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.

There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world.