Quotes About Subjectivity

No two men living at the same time live in the same time.

A story, no matter how factually true, is still just a story.

The ham tastes like an old handbag.

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me.

The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o'-the-wisp.

A la historia la organizan los historiadores; ellos la hacen coherente e inteligible, mediante el uso de puntos de vista e interpretaciones que son, siempre, parciales, provisionales, y, en última instancia, tan subjetivas como las construcciones artísticas.

Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.

One man's fish is another man's poisson.

There is no absolute truth. There is only your own truth. Write honestly, from the heart, and you will reach your readers.

I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness.

One's first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.

personal animosity resonated throughout essays written as if music, the most subjective of aesthetic forms, had been elevated to the objectivity of scientific principles.

It is, indeed, strange how often persons, living in other respects quite unobjectively, can suddenly become acutely objective about some specific concern of their own.

Atwater gave the boy twopence and began to bite the apple. It was green and tasted of absolutely nothing. It was like eating material in the abstract.

Choosing the type of girl one likes is about the last thing left that one is allowed to approach subjectively. I shall continue to exercise the option.

Nulla è buono o cattivo al mondo, se non il modo in cui lo presentiamo a noi stessi.

Somos los únicos seres sobre el planeta que llevamos una vida interna tan rica que lo más importante para nosotros no son los acontecimientos en sí, sino cómo los interpretamos;

Anything is constitutional, or anything is unconstitutional, just as you choose to look at it.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene.

Siempre hay tres partes de un recuerdo, la tuya, la de los demás, y la verdad, que está en algún sitio en medio de las otras dos.

there is no absolute truth, there is only the interpretation of truth.