Quotes About Subjectivity

There is no such thing as objective reality or 'the real world.' There are no absolutes. The face of your greatest enemy might be the face of my finest friend. An event that appears to be a tragedy to one might reveal the seeds of unlimited opportunity to another. What really separates people who are habitually upbeat and optimistic from those who are consistently miserable is how the circumstances of life are interpreted and processed.

No existe lo que llamamos realidad objetiva o «mundo real». No existen los absolutos. El rostro de tu peor enemigo puede ser el de mi mejor amigo. Algo que parece una tragedia para alguien puede contener la semilla de una magnífica oportunidad para otro. Lo que separa de veras a las personas alegres u optimistas de las que están sumidas en la desdicha es la forma de interpretar y procesar las circunstancias de la vida.

When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment.

The object we love seems to us more beautiful than it is:

Is it our senses that lend the subject these different conditions, while the subjects nevertheless have only one? That is what we see in the bread we eat; it is only bread, but our use makes of it bones, blood, flesh, hair, and nails:

Now since our condition accommodates things to itself and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except as falsified and altered by our senses.

Pauline Kael] had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn't apply her 'approach' to a film. With her it was all personal.

A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.

Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.

The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.

Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person's taste be used to cast judgement on another's? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.

it is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

how can I know the world as it is? I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?

We call something beautiful, when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form.

Beauty is a value as important as truth and goodness

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

What's truth, anyway? Truth is what you make it.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

In terms of image-repertoire, the Photographer (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.

The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.