Quotes About Subjectivity

It appears that the way people perceive the world is much more important to happiness than objective circumstances.

You cannot judge what should bring others joy, and others cannot judge what should bring you joy.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

Reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness.

Each to their own reality

Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

History is neither written nor made without love or hate.

History is no criminal court

History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.

If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.

There is no history, only histories.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

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

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.