Quotes About Subjectivity

However, no two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is - in other words, not a thing, but a think.

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

I wouldn't advocate anything to anybody - everybody's different. Some people can put on those toe shoes and think they're having a better work out than those in tennis shoes. Everybody can advocate their own way of doing something.

The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.

Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.

Normal is a piece of string. What's normal for one person is off the chart for another.

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

I was once present at a lecture that Eugene Smith gave to some students at a school of photography. At the end, they protested because he had made no mention of photography, but had spoken the whole time about music. He calmed them by saying that what was valid for one was valid for another. —Henri Cartier-Bresson

A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted.

Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all, except in so far as thinking has made it so.

Coffee is not my cup of tea

Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can't call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don't waste your time knocking the rest.

We all live our lives from the inside of our bodies out, not from the outside in. Which is why fiction has the texture that it does.

People probably do hear watches go tic-tok. But I'm sure my childhood clock went tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic…Why

On est toujours le con de quelqu'un.

The personal is theoretical.

Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.

Truth is the aim of story. And though we must take into account the human author's subjectivity and personal slant, the best authors are those who tap universal longings and make connections to our real, lived humanity.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form.

The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.