Quotes About Subjectivity

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

I've made a picture of the world. It may be right. It may be wrong. But for me it is very real ...

Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its universal character.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

We try to understand the pain of others but we can only understand it our way.

but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.

As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

Each believed that the life he himself led was the only real life and the life led by his friend was nothing but an illusion.

It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm.

Even Karenin, who might well have turned out to be a flat caricature with his stick-out ears and cracking knuckles, is endowed with a complex personality as the other characters see him differently on different occasions: when Anna sees him at the Petersburg station, when he is at his government desk, when his son recoils from his embrace, when he is at the interview with his divorce lawyer, when

And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Cualquier acto de un loco, de un borracho o de un hombre excitado se presenta, ante los ojos de quien conoce el estado de ánimo del autor del hecho, como menos libre y más sujeto a las leyes de la necesidad, y más libre y menos sometido a la necesidad a juicio de quien no lo conoce.

I prefer to rely on my memory. I have lived with that memory a long time, I am used to it, and if I have rearranged or distorted anything, surely that was done for my own benefit.

The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the realm of aesthetics, reason is always subordinate to perception.

Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich , a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding für uns , a thing as we know it.

Ecco che lei torna alle parole che decidono, alle parole che dividono: migliore, peggiore; giusto, ingiusto; bianco, nero. E tutto invece non è che una caduta, una lunga caduta: come nei sogni...

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Experience itself is convention and we are outside of experience.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus.