Quotes About Subjectivity

Yeah, I think of what I do as a work of journalism. It's more like the op-ed page, though. These are my opinions. My point of view. The opinions are mine and I let you make up your own mind.

A lot of times, movies that are in the top 10 lists or maybe even win Baftas or Oscars, you then watch them a year later and you go, 'Maybe it wasn't so great.'

Every photograph is the photographer's opinion about something. It's how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny.

What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.

No one, and I mean no one, gets personally offended by someone saying a food that they like is just okay - as if I had just attacked one of their character traits - unless 'character trait' is exactly what they consider liking that food to be.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.

To each is own

My method is to call in support of my statements the evidence of a single witness, the man I am arguing with, and to take his vote alone; the rest of the world are nothing to me; I am not talking to them.

Humans, as a rule, were doggedly determined not to believe in the experiences of anyone but themselves.

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.

The truth is your servant, not your master. What is the truth, anyway? Does any of us really know what's true? And is truth an absolute? Can't things be sort of true? A little bit true? True in a deeper sense? True enough for military work? True for me, not for you? All too true?

On the whole, art should not be explained; it must be experienced.

I do not subscribe to this communal error of judging a man according to the way I perceive things.

One should take good care never to treat one's own moral code as something universally valid

Nulle part autant qu'ici on ne constate aussi nettement l'étonnante différence qui peut exister entre les récits faits à la même heure d'un seul et même événe- ment par plusieurs observateurs.

You are a different 'other' for each person you come into contact with, depending on how they 'read' or experience you. And, of course, each person you meet is an other for you in a way which comes very much out of your subjective reading of who that person is, your unconscious assumptions, as well as what could be called facts about the person.

To the flow of recognition between my 'I' and your 'you' I bring my desires, my prejudices, and the force of my needs—conscious and unconscious—to the 'evidence' before me. In doing this, I create my own version of you. What this adds up to is that you are a somewhat different other for each person with whom you have contact.

Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.