#Subjectivity Quotes

“Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”

“It depends little on the object, much on the mood, in art.”

“Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast”

“Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'”

“Reality is what I see, not what you see.”

“Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.”

“A thing is important if anyone think it important.”

“The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!”

“The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.”

“Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.”

“I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.”

“Change is always subjective. To talk of evil and misery is nonsense, because they do not exist outside. If I am immune from all anger, I never feel angry. If am immune from all hatred, I never feel hatred.”

“But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.”

“If you stepped out of bounds, or you stepped out of your tumbling path and didn't stick it. By the time you're done, you can count your own damn deductibles to know what your score is about to be. But this is completely different, it's so subjective. There are so many variables that don't make sense. You can't quantify someone's emotional connection to what you feel.”

“Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”

“Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”

“If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is ugliness.”

“If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake.”

“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”

“What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.”

“Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”

“If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.”

“I really don't know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them I think, 'That's really a better meaning than I thought, and perfectly valid, given the words that exist.' So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them, and they might be more powerful than the ones I'm thinking.”

“A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder”

“It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.”

“It is absolutely impossible for a subject to see or have insight into something while leaving itself out of the picture, so impossible that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres.”

“Completely true to nature!' - what a lie: / How could nature ever be constrained into a picture? / The smallest bit of nature is infinite! / And so he paints what he likes about it. / And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!”

“How can you measure acting in inches?”

“Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.”

“All perception is colored by emotion.”

“. . . as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe that feeling will help them out, even in what concerns general laws: and besides, feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil, nor has any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings. . . .”

“The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.”

“I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.”

“I can't tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.”

“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.”

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”

“We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.”

“Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.”

“The world is my representation”

“Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.”

“That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.”

“But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.”