Quotes About Subjectivity

A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.

Unless you are unique, your opinion goes out the window.

In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

I hate movies that tell people what to think. I'm proud that Democrats thought 'Thank You For Smoking' was their film and Republicans thought it was theirs. I'm proud that pro-choice people thought 'Juno' was their film and pro-life people thought it was theirs.

Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup.

I do not believe in the concept of good and evil in my personal life, in the real world. I just don't believe it. I never try to judge.

Don't try and do the right thing, because there is no right thing; there's just the right thing for you.

Always remember: My general theme is 'There is no message.' There never has been. Stop trying to find the message or the meaning in everything. That's. My. Theme.

Now can you rate your pain for me on a scale of one to ten?" But I couldn't. It seemed so wrong to me then that there were only ten options, only ten types of pain. Because I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of types of pain in this world, maybe even thousands. And none of these are numbers on the same scale. They all hurt differently, and amounts have nothing to do with it. They all hurt too much, and not enough.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. You draw up an X axis and a Y axis, where a positive slope represents a positive attitude, plot some points, and there you go. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

IF EVERYTHING REALLY does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. You draw up an X axis and a Y axis, where a positive slope represents a positive attitude, plot some points, and there you go. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable

El hombre es la medida de todas las cosas», dijo el filósofo griego Protágoras, una línea que bien podría describir también el espíritu de la nueva era que se abría en Europa.

We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves—or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.

The Text is not a definitive object.

what is significant about rejection, as a source of neurotic anxiety, is how it is interpreted by the child. In impact upon the child, there is radical difference between rejection as an objective experience (which does not necessarily result in subjective conflict for the child), and rejection as a subjective experience. The important question psychologically is whether the child felt himself or herself rejected.

People often told him that Lan was very beautiful, but Pei had no opinion about that. He had never really noticed other women, and to say that a woman was or was not beautiful meant looking at her with an experienced eye.

Protagoras first wrote a phrase to which we shall have to return many times in this book: "Man is the measure of all things." As Toynbee writes, if we were to take that phrase out of Greek language and put it into Judeo-Christian language, "we should say the Hellenes saw in Man 'the Lord of Creation,' and worshipped him as an idol in the place of God.

Recognizing Pablo Picasso in a train compartment, a man inquired of the artist why he did not paint people "the way they really are." Picasso asked what he meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, "That's my wife." Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?" 5

T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.

Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.