Quotes About Subjectivity

people can be creul,people can be mean, what they say about us is not true it makes it there opinion, and it doesnt mean thats how the rest of the world see's it.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Aren't I happy?' Ursula puzzled. What do you think? Ursula didn't know. She wasn't sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was.

If you were to ask me what the book is about (which is the most loathsome question you could ask—why bother to write the thing if you then have to explain it? It is what it is) and if I were forced to answer, I would say, "It's about things.

She can only see other people in reference to how they make her feel

Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.

Americans really believe that the past is past, he writes. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. The forward thrust of exuberance, like closure, risks leaving behind an essential past.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. 

Besides there are somethings that can't be the truth even if they did happen.

Left-Hand or interior events cannot be seen in that fashion. You cannot see love, envy, wonder, compassion, insight, intentionality, spiritual illumination, states of consciousness, value, or meaning running around out there in the empirical world. Interior events are not seen in an exterior or objective manner, they are seen by introspection and interpretation

Across the board, the sense of being any sort of Seer or Witness or Self vanishes altogether. You don't look at the sky, you are the sky. You can taste the sky. It's not out there. As Zen would say, you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, you can swallow the Kosmos whole—precisely because awareness is no longer split into a seeing subject in here and a seen object out there. There is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its display are not-two.

The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.

Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to the situation that has value. All the meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

One of Stevens's epigrams ran, 'Black is white with a bright ring around it.' The Orwellian tone of that statement is justified. Stevens knew only too well that you can get people to believe almost anything about their own perceptions with a little sleight of hand. Subjectively, there are no absolutes, only contrasts.

Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

When, for instance, we say that a literary work is good or bad, we are making a value judgment (...) Objective evidence for subjective preferences does not makes the value judgment itself objective, but merely objectifies the preference.

It is impossible to experience one's own death objectively and still carry a tune.

There's no rhyme or reason to anything that I do. It's whatever seems right at the time.

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.