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Objectivity Quotes

Browse 365 quotes about Objectivity.

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Objectivity Quotes

“First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and the world. It looks at things objectively (yathābhūtam). It does not falsely lull you into living in a fool's paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize you with all kinds of imaginary fears and sins. It tells you exactly and objectively what you are and what the world around you is, and shows you the way to perfect freedom, peace, tranquility and happiness.”

PhilosophyTruthReligionBuddhismBalanceObjectivityObjectivismMiddle WayMiddle PathThe Middle PathThe Middle Way
Book:What the Buddha Taught
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“I doubt I'm the only one in this field exasperated by people who claim that their variety of farming is the best of all possible systems in the best of all possible worlds. I've seen farmers who set out with high ideals gradually becoming hucksters, overlooking the drawbacks of their practice, exaggerating the advantages, subordinating their intellects to their interests. The people I'm drawn to are those, like Tolly, with a capacity for self-correction, who recognize the flaws in what they do and seek to address them.”

HonestyCertaintyFarmingObjectivity
Book:Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
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“На поминках по моему отцу за одним столом в первый и последний раз встретились две ветви моей семьи — дед по матери, уроженец юга Украины и выпускник техникума, сталинист, ветеран Финской и Великой Отечественной, и двоюродная бабушка по отцу, яркий представитель московской еврейской интеллигенции, доктор наук, муж которой чудом не попал в лагерь. В какой-то момент речь зашла о репрессиях — семья отца была репрессирована, его отец погиб в лагере, а сам он провел несколько лет в ссылке. И произошла удивительная вещь. Оказалось, что эти два человека прожили свои жизни в разных странах, никак не пересекавшихся друг с другом. Дед, по его словам, не знал о репрессиях, их, скорее всего, и не было. А в той стране, где жила бабушка, все всё знали с 20-х годов, и аресты и лагеря были, в общем, главной реальностью, в которой существовали она и ее круг. Тот разговор за столом со всей очевидностью продемонстрировал то, что абстрактно кажется невероятным. Объективной реальности прошлого не существует. Ее формирует память, а память необъективна. Но гораздо важнее, что такое неопределенное прошлое, в свою очередь, формирует настоящее. Замороженная и «непредсказуемая» история страны с двоящейся памятью оборачивается двоящейся реальностью в настоящем. Такая раздвоенность чревата, в лучшем случае, «просто» невозможностью двигаться вперед, в худшем — гражданской войной.”

PastImaginationFamilyMemoryUncertaintyRepressionObjectivityStalinismBifurcation
Author:Николай Эппле
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“I often hear the argument that "being a loser is your choice and you should be respected for it," which is not true. Your parents raised you, and you're letting down all their investment in you; your ancestors struggled and died to produce you, and you have an innate loyalty to your society, which provides for you. Similarly, you have a loyalty to yourself and the person you could be, or to an abstract concept like "good." This is how the vast majority of the world throughout history has viewed morality, with modern Western atheist societies being the bizarre exceptions. If you choose to discredit all of that—your family, society, your potential as an individual, or morality—there's something very wrong with you.”

SocietyIndividualitySociologyObjectivitySubjectivity
Author:Whatifalthist
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“It is true that we regard as objectively valuable those innermost elements of the "personalIty," those highest and most ultimate value-Judgments which determine our conduct and give meaning and significance to our life. We can indeed espouse these values only when they appear to us as valid, as derived from our highest values and when they are developed in the struggle against the difficulties which life presents. Certainly, the dignity of the "personality" lies in the fact that for it there exIst values about which It organizes its life; - even 1£ these values are m certain cases concentrated exclusively WIthin the sphere of the person's "individuality," then "self-realization" in those interests for which it claims validIty as values, is the idea wIth respect to which its whole existence is oriented.”

IndividualityObjectivity
Book:The methodology of the social sciences
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“Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.”

ArtModernUnityIndividualityMiddle AgesModernityObjectivityRenaissanceAntiquitySubjectivityIndividuationClassical
Book:Meaning in the Visual Arts
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“Let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity" — objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": — in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?”

PhilosophyObjectivityPragmatism
Book:On the Genealogy of Morals
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“Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.”

LifeFactsTimeHistoryMemoryMeaningObjectivitySubjectivity
Book:The Powerbook
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“Before asserting a prognosis on any patient, always be objective and never subjective. For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life, but then later discovering that he will lose, will harm him more than by telling him that he may lose, but then he wins.”

LifeHealthDoctorsOptimismMedicineHealthcarePhysiciansSubjectiveHuman BodyObjectivityDoctorSubjectivityObjective
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“... the mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God.”

MindGodTruthFaithIntellectObjectivity
Book:The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God
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“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”

LoveReasonUnderstandingCompassionHumilityConflictEmpathySelfishnessReasoningNarcissismSubjectiveObjectivityObjectiveErich FrommThe Art Of Loving
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“A long time ago, I discovered that all I have been taught about the disconnect and the contradiction between the heart and the mind is false and misleading. I have learned to feel with my mind and think with my heart. I have learned that the two are not enemies, but Siamese twins – you can’t silence one without crushing the other, too.”

LoveMindHeartKnowledgeCreativityObjectivitySubjectivityDecolonialityKnowledge ProductionLife Of The Mind
Author:Louis Yako
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“Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.”

SelfIndividualLanguagePerspectiveEgoPlasticObjectivitySubjectivityMultiplicityMetamorphosis
Book:Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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“I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.”

CharacterFree WillAlienationItalyObjectivitySubjectivityHegelCategorical ImperativeEssentialismPolitical AnimalUniversal Reasons
Book:Contempt
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“...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.”

ReasonTruthMetaphorMeaningObjectivityCorrespondenceConceptualizationEmbodied MindEmbodied Realism
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“The secret of producing meaningful and powerful knowledge is simple: be sincere. We must strive to be sincere in the way we approach any question, to be sincere in understanding our limits and blind spots, and to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses at all times. I have learned that objectivity is impossible, but sincerity is not. It is the latter that brings us the closest possible to objectivity, and only through sincerity we can build bridges of reconciliation between the subjective and the objective.”

WritingReasonKnowledgeCreativityCreative WritingObjectivitySubjectivityDecolonialityKnowledge ProductionLife Of The Mind
Author:Louis Yako
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“When the matter at hand is eternal salvation or damnation, the “unsettled soul” suspicious of ritual and tradition looks for evidence of her spiritual condition as close to the knowing self as possible, not in the objective mathematical language to which the Royal Society aspired but in objective experiences of spontaneous, passionate speech: in the substance of the inmost, most immediate thoughts and feelings, evinced by spontaneous, fervent prayer, which it takes both scientifically and economically as proofs and tokens of grace. If the Restoration witnessed the rise of what Robert Markley has called the ideology of objectivity, it also saw the coalescence of a related ideology of spontaneity. Concerned with the science of the soul and informed by emerging market and commercial logic, the cardinal points of this ideology were authentic and immediate sincerity (as opposed to performance or artifice), pure desire (as opposed to coldness, hypocrisy or a bifurcation between doctrinal knowledge and feeling), freedom (as opposed to form), and novelty and currency (as opposed to the repetitive, the boring, and the out-of-date). In the consolidation of the discourse and practice of free prayer, we see the culmination of Renaissance crises of representation and the fruition of the dramatic Reformation attacks on ritual, when under increasing pressures toward certainty and ever more entrenched economic logics, spontaneity becomes policy: not an option, but, for growing numbers of Protestants, paradoxically an obligation and the sine qua non of valid prayer and a saved subjectivity.”

GodPrayerSalvationRitualFeelingObjectivityProtestantSpotaneity
Book:Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth
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