Quotes About Subjectivity

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

Obviously, we all look at things through the filter of our own experiences.

Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.

Junk is in the eyes of the beholder. Some look, but others see.

All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are correct. For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

It might have been a single day; it might have been a week; from his dreams, it could have been months.

What's worthless to you might not be worthless to me.

Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her; it was so different that it was not even the same event.

You're bigger than I remembered, she said stupidly. You too, he said. I also remembered that you were beautiful. Memory does play tricks on us. No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.

When you are the object of a person's affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in his presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.

A man never is quite such an abject specimen as his wife makes him look

If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me..

Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don't think so.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.

It is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: 'other' above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconsciousness.

In other words, there is no single underlying reality that is independent of our observations. "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is," Bohr declared. "Physics concerns what we can say about nature."62 This

It is very important to note, however, that the theory of relativity does not mean that "everything is relative." It does not mean that everything is subjective. Instead

The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the lord of every story will be I.