Subject Quotes

“You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”
― Henri Matisse

“Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.”
― André Breton

“To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”
― Isaac Newton

“Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Psychology is a subject of life, death, and in-betweens.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.”
― Charles Olson

“Sometimes a controversial statement can be used to determine where the loyalty of the subject lies.”
― DON SANTO

“Now, we turn to the gods – not for guidance or protection, but as experimental subjects. Deities, demons and other supernatural entities can be considered as self-perpetuating structures in the elemental chaos. They might be naturally accreting structures, or perhaps they were unconsciously shaped over many generations by blind faith. These self-perpetuating structures can channel elemental energy through congruent souls – or, to put it another way, saints manifest the sacred blessings of the gods.”
― Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, The Gutter Prayer

“The disaster of learning is that to let students to memorize a subject without seeing the thing practically and knowing what it is like.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“Tamlin won't allow it.'

'Tamlin isn't your keeper, and you know it.'

'I'm his subject, and he is my High Lord...'

'You are no one's subject.'

I went rigid at the flash of teeth, the smoke-like wings that flared out.

'I will say this once- and only once,' Rhysand purred, stalking to the map on the wall. 'You can be a pawn, be someone's reward, and spend the rest of your immortal life bowing and scraping and pretending you're less than him, than Ianthe, than any of us. If you want to pick that road, then fine. A shame, but it's your choice.' The shadow of wings rippled again. 'But I know you- more than you realise, I think- and I don't believe for one damn minute that you're remotely fine with being a pretty trophy for someone who sat on his ass for nearly fifty years, then set on his ass while you were shredded apart-'

'Stop it-'

'Or,' he plowed ahead, 'you've got another choice. You can master whatever powers we gave you, and make it count. You can play a role in this war. Because war is coming one way or another.'
...
'Think it over. Take the week. Ask Tamlin, if it'll make you sleep better. See what charming Ianthe says about it. But it's your choice to make- no one else's.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“Man's three 'inner facts', the things he believed in most firmly—the will, the mind, the I—were projected out of himself: he derived the concept of Being from the concept of the I, and posited the existence of 'things' after his own image, after his concept of the I as cause. No wonder if, later on, he only ever rediscovered in things what he had put in them.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“When I was an authority on many subjects, I found myself subject to the authorities.”
― Aegelis, Specks of Shadows, Flecks of Light

“The Russians make the USA look like incompetents on the subject of the long term biological effects of electro-magnetic radiation (EMR).”
― Steven Magee

“As far as I am aware, I am the only person in the world researching High Altitude Observatory Diseases (HAOD) and that makes me the world’s leading expert on the subject.”
― Steven Magee

“Perhaps, I am an unknown subject for you because only you do not know me.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“The sign is supposed to be based on the categories of 'similitude' or 'identity' . This presumed fallacy renders the sign coherent with the ideological notion of the subject. The subject as a presupposed transcendental unity which opens itself to the world (or to which the world opens) through the act of representation, as well as the subject that transfers its representations onto other subjects in the process of communication, is supposedly a philosophical fiction dominating all of the history of philosophy.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“All that remains is the Object as a strange attractor. The subject is no longer a strange attractor. We know the subject too well; the subject knows himself too well. It is the Object that is exciting, because the Object is my vanishing point.
The Object is what theory can be for reality: not a reflection but a challenge, and a strange attractor. This, potentially, is the way to go in search of otherness.
There are two methods of getting beyond alienation. Either disalienation and the reappropriation of oneself - a tiresome process, without much prospect of success these days. Or the other extreme - the path of the absolute Other, of absolute exoticism. This alternative path leads to an exponential defined elsewhere, virtually, in terms of total excentricity. It goes beyond alienation but in the same direction - to what is more other than the Other, to radical otherness.
The duality of otherness implies an unchallengeable metamorphosis, an unchallengeable supremacy of appearances and metamorphoses. I am not alienated. Rather, I am definitively other. No longer subject to the law of desire, but subject now to the total artifice of rules. I have lost any trace of desire of my own. I answer only to something non-human - something inscribed not within me but solely in the objective and arbitrary vicissitudes of the world's signs.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Let kids decide what they want to learn and you’ll find nearly every subject you could ever want to teach about can fall within the bounds of the project.”
― Richie Norton

“That you have to talk about only one thing many times does not mean that you have to say one thing many times.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The beauty of the subject often deceives us into thinking that someone is a great photographer.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Little did I realize then, I would need to steep myself in sex, immerse myself in the subject. I'd have to open my mind, return to a time when all I knew and understood was sex.”
― Kristina Smeriglio, Falling Into Fire

“What this means is that subject is not the real person behind the symbolic mask but the self-awareness of the mask itself in its distance towards the real person.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“We can never escape from ourselves, since subjectivity is governed by a most tragic principle, that of self-imprisonment. If being a perpetual prisoner is a terrible condition, how much more grim and horrible will the situation be of a prisoner who is his own jailer.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, Psychological Investigations

“When I was an authority on many subjects, I found myself a subject to the authorities.”
― Aegelis, Specks of Shadows, Flecks of Light

“La paradoja coherente de la filosofía de Hume consiste en presentar una subjetividad que se supera y que no es por eso menos pasiva. La subjetividad está determinada como un efecto; es una impresión de reflexión. El espíritu deviene sujeto al ser afectado por los principios.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature

“Earlier theories of language, grounded in the duality of body and soul, had guaranteed the rational self a life outside of language. Enlightenment sensualism erases that option. To stop signifying is to regress to the dumb, unconscious body. The subject in suspended between a primal oblivion and the artificial web of symbols.”
― Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

“Earlier theories of language, grounded in the duality of body and soul, had guaranteed the rational self a life outside of language. Enlightenment sensualism erases that option. To stop signifying is to regress to the dumb, unconscious body. The subject is suspended between a primal oblivion and the artificial web of symbols.”
― Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

“Tears of merriment flow from the eyes, so too do tears of grief and pain. Hence tears are symbols of the spirit: it is as though something of me is lost with them. For this reason people have since ancient times felt the impulse to collect their tears in lachrymatories. Psalm 56, v. 8, laments to God ‘Thou tellest my wanderings, put Thou my tears in Thy bottle; are they not in Thy Book?’ Tears are like pains: they cannot be voluntary, even if you can do something else in order to produce them. Although there are actors and hypocrites who can produce tears at will, that does not make tears into intentional actions; it just means that there are ways of making the eyes water without producing ‘real tears’. But laughing and smiling can be willed, and when they are willed they have a ghoulish, threatening quality, as when someone laughs cynically, or hides behind a knowing smile. Voluntary laughter may also be a kind of spiritual armour, with which a person defends himself against a treacherous world.

Similar observations apply to blushes, which are more like tears than laughter in that they cannot be intended. What Milton says about smiles could equally be said of blushes. Blushes from reason flow, to brute denied, and are of love the food. Only a rational being can blush, even though nobody can blush voluntarily. Even if, by some trick, you are able to make the blood flow into the surface of your cheeks, this would not be blushing but a kind of deception. And it is the involuntary character of the blush that conveys its meaning. Mary’s blush upon meeting John, being involuntary, impresses him with the sense that he has summoned it – that it is in some sense his doing, just as her smile is his doing. Her blush is a fragment of her first person perspective, called up onto the surface of her being and made visible in her face. In our experience of such things our sense of the animal unity of the other combines with our sense of his unity as a person, and we perceive those two unities as an indissoluble whole. The subject becomes, then, a real presence in the world of objects.”
― Roger Scruton, Face of God: The Gifford Lectures