Subjective Quotes
More Subjective Quotes
[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).
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
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
The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. … subjective reason conforms to anything.
max horkheimer— pp. 24-25 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
[A]t its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.
john d. carmack— Quoted in John Carmack Biography.
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
The study of the structure of subjective experience.
— Bandler, Grinder, also the subtitle of Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume I (1980) by Robert Dilts
Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.
niels bohr— "The Unity of Human Knowledge" (October 1960)
The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.
georg brandes— pp. 18-19 (An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889))
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))
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits … A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life .
william james— Ch. 9 (The Principles of Psychology (1890))
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
william james— "Reflex Action and Theism"
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 camera is as subjective as we are.
bertrand russell— An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.
john searle— John R. Searle (2002) Consciousness and Language, p. 47
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.
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
— Niels Bohr Remarks after the Solvay Conference (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))
Are we to suppose that the only being in the universe who cannot answer prayer is that One who alone has all power at His command? The weak theology that professes to believe that prayer has merely a subjective benefit is infinitely less scientific than the action of the child who confidently appeals to a Father in heaven.
— John William Dawson, p. 461. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
As is known, the question of the objectivity or the subjectivity of probability has divided the world of science into two camps. Some maintain that there exist two types of probability, as above, others, that only the subjective exists, because regardless of what is supposed to take place, we cannot have full knowledge of it. Therefore, some lay the uncertainty of future events at the door of our knowledge of them, whereas others place it within the realm of the events themselves.
— Stanis?aw Lem, "De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Vitae Prognoscendi", in A Perfect Vacuum (1971), tr. Michael Kandel (1978).
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
Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.
— Niels Bohr, "The Unity of Human Knowledge" (October 1960)
