Subjective Quotes
More Subjective Quotes
The path of spiritual progress that the teachers of the Bengal school recommend is neither yoga nor jnana but bhakti. While the followers of the way of yoga emphasise the subjective aspect and those of the path of jnana both the subjective and objective aspect, the followers of the path of bhakti emphasize the objective aspect of consciousness .
— Vaishnavism school of Bengal quoted in "Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern", by K. R. Sundararajan in p. 57
[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. […]It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive; a stoniness of heart, that will not brook any resistance — as expressed once, most radically, in the following terrifying statement: "Every action makes sense, even criminal acts ... all passivity is senseless."
josef pieper— p. 14
— The Goethe quote is from his Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Günther Müller (Stuttgart, 1943), no. 1415. The other quote is from Hermann Rauschning's Conversations with Hitler (Gespräche mit Hitler, 1940).
With the emergence of nuclear-missile weaponry, cybernetics, electronics, and computer equipment, any subjective approach to military problems, hare-brained plans, and superficiality can cause irreparable damage.
matvei zakharov— Quoted in "Stalin's Generals" - Page 338 - by Harold Shukman - History - 2002
Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
l. neil smith— Ceres, Chapter Eighteen[31], 2009
Bernoulli's real contribution was to coin a word. The word has been translated into English as "utility". It describes this subjective value people place on money.
william poundstone— Part Four, St. Petersburg Wager, Daniel Bernoulli, p. 184
Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.
andrei tarkovsky— p. 150 (Sculpting in Time (1986))
Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain.
john tyndall— Professor Virchow and Evolution
Bear in mind that the novel no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective is always a historical projection of its own time.
samuel r. delany— Chapter 4 (p. 116)
Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.
john n. gray— "Neoconned!: How Blair took New Labour for a ride," The Independent (2007-06-22)
It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.
Peter Greenaway— From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism .
max horkheimer— p. 148 ("The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937))
The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflection about the social order as a whole.
max horkheimer— p. 4 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.
Immanuel Kant— A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 955
The shapes they take are both objective and subjective. One can shape them a little with one's own mind.
r. a. lafferty— Ch. 7 (Past Master (1968))
Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness voilà the epistemological roots of idealism.
— Collected Works, Vol. 38, pp. 357–61[ ].
Well, beauty’s in the eye of the beholder... It’s all subjective. I’m kind of shy about it, but I’ll take it.
marisa miller— [2]
It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves...
bertrand russell— An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
The concrete is a combination of abstractions not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon.
— p.147 (In Defense of Marxism (1942))
But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of his own emotions. Emotions are subjective and he can communicate them only when he clothes them in objective guise; and how can he ever be so arrogant as to know when he is dressing up the right emotion in the right Sunday suit?
richard wright— p. viii (Native Son (1940))
And in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance.
richard wright— pg. xxv (Native Son (1940))
The study of the structure of subjective experience.
— Bandler, Grinder, also the subtitle of Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume I (1980) by Robert Dilts
Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.
— Levine, Judith (2003). "Therapy". Harmful to Minors. Thunder's Mouth Press. p. 48. ISBN 1-56025-516-1.
Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism.
— Max Horkheimer (1937) The Latest Attack on Metaphysics p. 148
Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.
— John R. Searle (2002) Consciousness and Language, p. 47
The Largest Disservice to LISP is most frequently done whenever a LISP advocate opens his/her mouth. LISP advocates have been, in my limited and biased experience, some of the most arrogant and condescending bastards in the world. (…) I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as, "LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world" and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard a Java , C++, C, Perl , or Python advocate make the same claim about their own language of choice.
— Comment on Slashdot
— Response: "To be fair, the Java, C++, C, Perl or Python advocate wouldn't have much of a case..."
This method of Bare Attention, so helpful to mind-knowledge and, through it, to world-knowledge, tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist and scholar: clear definition of subject-matter and terms; unprejudiced receptivity for the instruction that comes out of the things themselves; exclusion, or at least reduction, of the subjective factor in judgment; deferring of judgment until a careful examination of facts has been made.
— Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 39
subjective reason … is inclined to abandon the fight with religion by setting up two different brackets, one for science and philosophy, and one for institutionalized mythology, thus recognizing both of them. For the philosophy of objective reason there is no such way out. Since it hold to the concept of objective truth, it must take a positive or a negative stand with regard to the content of established religion.
max horkheimer— p. 12 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
The separation of Science from Knowledge was effected step by step as the subjective Method was replaced by the Objective Method: i.e., when in each inquiry the phenomena of external nature ceased to be interpreted on premisses suggested by the analogies of human nature.
george henry lewes— George Henry Lewes, Aristotle: a Chapter from the History of Science (1864)
