Quotes About Subjectivity

People live in the six inches of real estate between their ears—in that three pounds of fat and protein that is the human brain. They live inside their heads. That's where reality resides. That's where every single human constructs an individual narrative of their life. That's where they tell themselves who they are, and what they can and can't be. And no person's reality can ever be the same as anyone else's.

the human mind is not an objective recorder of information . . .

Look at you… You're perfect. Not… perfect. Perfect to me…

Not everyone can be equally right, Harry." "But believe you me, everyone can be equally wrong," I said.

He sees the color blue," the etherealist said. "But his color blue. Not yours.

It only means what you decide it means.

Three blind men were shown an elephant. They touched it with their hands to determine what the creature was. The first man felt the trunk, and claimed that an elephant was like a snake. The second man touched its leg and claimed that an elephant was like a tree. The third man touched its tail, and claimed that the elephant was like a slender rope.

Todo amor não é uma espécie de comparação?

people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.

I WAS trained to distrust other people's versions, but we go with what we have. We triangulate the coverage. Handicap for bias. Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation. Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak.

The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.

Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

There is no one truth. There's only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

What one person takes away from a book might be very different from what the next person takes away -- almost as if the story is altered depending on who's reading, where, and when. But then, maybe all books are like that -- a little different each time they are opened. The real question is who's doing the changing: the story, or the reader.

I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

Being pretty and beautiful have very different definitions in my book.

No two people read the same book.

Beauty in things lies in the mind which contemplates them.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

Beauty?...To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.