Quotes About Subjectivity

Well, evil to some is always good to others." —Jane Austen, Emma

they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

As one Shostakovich biographer put it, "Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn't a genuine one.

they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

De kunst is fraaier dan de werkelijkheid, maar beide leggen het af tegen de herinnering.

Each person is worth the value put on them by the affection of others, and that is where popular wisdom has found that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel. I can feel. No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine. It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no given 'right' reaction.

We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot.

Logic is relative.

And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith—his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his mean-spirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother—that she'd had the good sense to shrug him off.

And more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I was thinking, when I looked back—up the nighttime mountain—at the wrecked train, lying in the snow.

After all, I do not believe that one must necessarily scrape bottom, as it were, in order to view his society subjectively. Rather than moving vertically downward, one may move horizontally outward toward a point of sufficient detachment where a modicum of creature comforts are not necessarily precluded.

Don't assume that everyone on earth has seen every movie you have seen.

A system of morality that is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception that has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

What I want is that my picture should evoke nothing but emotion.

The way one sees is also dependent upon one's emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways, and this is what makes art so interesting.

Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

You bring to a painting your own experience.

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.

Art is an experience, not an object.

The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.