Quotes About Objectivity

The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.

One truth doesn't refute another. Truth doesn't lie in the object, but in how we see it.

Knowledge is power," Francis Bacon said in a peculiarly prophetic moment. He was right; "modern" scientific knowledge has demonstrated its power for three centuries. With postmodernism, however, the situation is reversed. There is no purely objective knowledge, no truth of correspondence. Instead there are only stories, stories that, when they are believed, give the storyteller power over others.

Where you stand should not depend on where you sit.

The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

It's much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction—to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see.

But later in high school she became both bored and confused. Bored at the trivia she was taught and confused by the inconsistencies of the teachers who taught it. She wanted to learn how to deal with reality and evaluate it objectively, how to think. She was taught that language has no meaning, poetry needs no structure, and philosophy is fine in theory but useless in practice.

As an actress, I have to be objective about myself. If I don't criticize myself, there are plenty who will do a find job of it for me!

I don't like comparing projects. I find it too difficult because I can't objectively look at a piece when I'm so subjectively involved it.

Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

I could have never been a high diver or a gymnast because I don't like subjectivity. I love where I'm faster than you,, or I can jump higher or swim faster. I don't want you holding a card before I figure out whether I won or lost.

To increase our objectivity, we must learn to switch off the mini-movies. Objectivity requires us to be mindful, present in the moment, and experiencing what is happening without judgment.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

The objectivity we sought was the power to recollect — if not in tranquillity, at least in 'dispassion' and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.

objectivity arose from subjectivity—the recognition that two minds could have different representations of the world and that the world has an existence independent of either representation. This

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they'd been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude. The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions; and the most our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstance into account?

Put this all a different way, and perhaps the importance of this fact will become clear: the very key to your growth, development, and evolution is to make your present subject an object—that is, it is to look at your present subject instead of using it as something through which to view the world (and thus remain identified with).

Across the board, the sense of being any sort of Seer or Witness or Self vanishes altogether. You don't look at the sky, you are the sky. You can taste the sky. It's not out there. As Zen would say, you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, you can swallow the Kosmos whole—precisely because awareness is no longer split into a seeing subject in here and a seen object out there. There is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its display are not-two.

A wise neuter joins with neither, but uses both as his honest interest leads him.

It is impossible to experience one's own death objectively and still carry a tune.

Mais puisque je ne peux pas m'arracher à l'objectivité qui m'écrase, ni à la subjectivité qui m'exile, puisqu'il ne m'est pas possible de m'élever jusqu'à l'être, ni de tomber dans le néant, il faut que j'écoute. Il faut que je regarde autour de moi plus que jamais… Le monde… Mon semblable… Mon frère… »

As a professional, the teacher is "objective" when presenting the school curriculum: she doesn't "take sides," or "get political." However, the ideology of the status quo is built into the curriculum. The professional's objectivity, then, boils down to not challenging this built-in ideology.

Wisdom is the God-given ability to see life with rare objectivity and to handle life with rare stability.