Quotes About Subjectivity

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of posing. I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (...).

I cannot countenance the traditional belief that postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation' equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

mieux valent les leurres de la subjectivité que les impostures de l'objectivité.

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: "Technique," "Reality," "Reportage," "Art," etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

Lo que hoy es tabú es la sentimentalidad, no la sexualidad. El sujeto enamorado se siente muy solo hoy frente a lo que "la sociedad" hizo del amor.

However, he was persistent, which pleased or displeased people according to taste.

History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.

Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end?

With regard to both the physical and the social world, one of the main lessons of neuroscience is that our perception of reality is something we actively construct, not a passive documentation of objective events.

wine might be rated 91, but that number is meaningless if we have no estimate of the variation that would occur if the identical wine were rated again and again or by someone else.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!

Why, about you ! Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be? Where I am now, of course, said Alice. Not you! Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there King was to wake, added Tweedledum, you'd go out--bang!--just like a candle! I shouldn't! Alice exclaimed indignantly.

The Jury had each formed a different view Long before the indictment was read And they all spoke at once so that none of them knew One word that the other had said

Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.

Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

There are two worlds: The world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world we feel with our hearts and imaginations.

Every experience that we have is unique to us because at some deep level we make an interpretation of it.

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

One man's Poison Ivy is another Fellow's Spinach.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.