Quotes About Subjectivity

Painting it's a blind man profession. Painter is painting not what he sees but what he feels.

we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw not only that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.

I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years.

Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. "Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room." The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

It seems many people operate on the principle that whatever happened to them is not abuse, but if it had happened to someone else, or if it had been a bit more extreme, then it would have been abusive.

Napoleon once said, What is history, but a fable agreed upon? He smiled. By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

There is your truth and there is my truth...as for the universal truth it does not exist.

What is history, but a fable agreed upon?' Ã¢â'¬Â He smiled. "By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account." Sophie

As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?'... By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the 'I' behind the 'eye' that does the seeing.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

Most people would say that she's beautiful. -That's because she's been with most people.

Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness?

Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who's to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say? . . .

Taste is a mystery.

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even good. What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I know absolutely nothing about art.

Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.

The absolutist takes himself to speak to the ages, with the tongue of angels, but the relativist hears only one version among others, the subjectivity of the here and now.

Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error...