Quotes About Subjectivity

So ethical conduct, practicing a moral life, is not something that can effectively be enforced from the outside but must grow out of a subjective understanding of what helps and what harms others.

Instinctively, we assume that objects exist separate from the mind, but any investigation of objects necessarily involves the mind in some way, so knowledge always has a subjective element. We know there is a pen because we experience the pen. Thus, no object of knowledge exists apart from the mind experiencing it.

True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, and that's something that nothing can obscure.

It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives:

The difficulty of any trial was subjective, and there was no way to compare two individuals' experiences. And just as those whose suffering seemed greater than his should have compassion for him, so should he have compassion for those whose suffering seemed less.

The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists subjectivity.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

I don't like to talk about what other players think because, as we say in Spanish, every person is a world, their own world.

If you go to Spain and ask, 'Who has the best goalkeepers?' they will say, 'The Spanish.' If you go to Germany, they will say German goalkeepers, and Italy the same. You go to England and they say, 'God knows!'

One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

A specific editor in a specific place likes the book, and you're in. A different editor on a different day goes, 'Oh, this isn't for me', or doesn't even look at it, and that's it.

I don't have a specific thing I want anyone to get out of anything I do.

My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.

I have my opinions about the way my father was. But they are my opinions, not necessarily the truth, and they are certainly not the whole spectrum of what this man was going through. It's my young, selfish interpretation of that person.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.

Each man believes only his experience.

One man's transparency is another's humiliation.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.