135 Quotes About Subjectivity

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

Science is thus not the creation of some kind of mysterious contact with or insight into ultimate reality, but the upshot of our own very human, and even culturally local, interests, concerns, and values. I suspect, also, that we are ready to give particular weight and credence to the 'evidence of our senses' because it is not in our interests to deceive ourselves about its nature (although it is certainly possible to do so).

I hope, wherever we are, we start to decolonize knowledge production through rekindling that deep and strong spark between the heart and the mind; through understanding that the path to objectivity goes through the painful corridors of subjectivity.

Unlike any other empirical object in Nature, the mind's presence is immediately apparent to itself, but opaque to all external observers.

We all are internal energy of the Universe -- and it's not even a metaphor -- there would be no dynamics whatsoever in the absence of us subjective participants.

The truth is, we live among fictions. All our thinking, feeling, and writing makes up versions of what we like to call reality; and our versions are subject to continual alteration with the passage of time and under the impress of other people's versions. Novels and poems, which are fictions made of the stuff of life, again and again will alter our decided versions of the lives we have lived and are living now.

Those two little words -- says you -- are the most powerful argument in any discipline: theology, philosphy, even domestic harmony. They are powerful because they are true. Whenever you say something, it is you who says it. You. And what do you know?

The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists subjectivity.