Quotes About Subjectivity

Kerosene...is nothing but perfume to me

But no man's a hero to himself

He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you.

No quiero aburrirlos demasiado con lo que me ocurrió personalmente

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function.

Everything wrong I've ever done has always seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.

So when people said that the music or the book or the film was "good" or "bad," I usually felt that I just didn't know what they were talking about.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him…. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

Four men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to expect this to happen night after night is unwise….

The most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises spontaneously in people's minds.

it often occurs that a work of art — even though incomprehensible — remains in the mind, and produces its effect years later, when people are apt to remark that it was not the same as when they first saw it, transferring to the object under discussion the chance in themselves.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.

Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.

Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.

We all bring out our own perceptions, needs, and experiences to everything we do.

Pero es que la palabra «amor» pertenece a la esfera del arte, no a la de la ciencia. Cada persona puede describirlo con distintos términos y sentirlo a su manera. Por amor habrá quien llore y quien sonría. Quien se enfade y quien se ponga triste. Quien se excite y quien esté tan satisfecho que el amor le dé sueño.

What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it.