Love Is Subjective Quotes & Sayings

We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept.
The relation constitutes the very subjectivity of of our existence. We participate in existence consciously and rationally, with subjective self-knowledge and identity, because the erotic drive of our nature is transformed into a personal relation when there arises in the space of the Other the first signifier of desire: the maternal presence. The subject is born with love's first leap of joy. — Christos Yannaras

Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in objectivity, in an Other whose Life is our true life, whose Love is our love, whose Joy is our joy, whose Peace is our peace, whose burdens are our burdens, whose Will is our will. Self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it. — Thomas Raymond Kelly

Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom's advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable education system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was mad invisible by research lingo: "MSM," otherwise known as "men who have sex with men'), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)... — Kiese Laymon

Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves...if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ's love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. — Kallistos Ware

Only by honoring the greater truths (the macrocosmic truth) may we begin to honor our subjective truths (our microcosmic truth). This is a recognition of the greater mystery of life and a deep honoring of being a child of that great mystery. In that profound recognition rests the awareness that the same macrocosmic mystery is within us, and it manifests and takes its course in many ways. When we simply recognize this fundamental aspect of the nature of existence, we can begin to understand its presence in our lives. And then finding ourselves moving away from the career or relationship we thought we'd be in for the rest of our life is less of a shock or a "something must be wrong" and more of a deep, humble sigh of "alright, okay, here we go, and so it is." This is the way life moves. We do not hold the reins, and to feign so creates only pain. Evolution necessitates change. — Tehya Sky

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between — Paul Kalanithi

The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity — David Abram

The mystery that remains in the sunset is the riddle of why and how a mixture of seemingly inert, unthinking atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and several other varieties can produce humans capable of having the subjective experience we refer to as beauty, or the love that would have us kiss our kids good night. Science is no closer to answering those questions today than it was a century ago. — Gerald Schroeder

I love math because there's always a right answer. It's not interpretive; it's not subjective. There is a correct destination, even if you have to hack through confusing parts to get there. That's not always true in life. — Emery Lord

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears. — Erich Fromm

Beauty is subjective. You know how sometimes what makes a person attractive is the way they make you laugh or how it seems like they can read your mind? — Kiera Cass

Love is something so relevant, so powerful and encompassing, yet we all have our own interpretation of what it is. Some versions are watered down, some are based on magical fairytales we hear as a child, and some are developed by watching those around us as we were growing up. No matter what the specifics, love has become a subjective term, verb and noun. — Camille Lucy

No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved's name in the outside world, and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions which we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see. — Marcel Proust

In a world without God, who's to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. Think of what that means! It means it's impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good. To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist - there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong. — William Lane Craig

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil. — Sarah Palin

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this it was not solely so. Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere. — Thomas Hardy

Light was the symbol I tried to give them...The Cross was the symbol they adopted. The pain of self-sacrifice was obvious to them. The subjective reward--incomprehensible. Thus they changed it all. I told them of many mansions. They chose this mansion or that--scoured each other off the earth, to set one heaven in place of the heaven of those they defeated. Holy wars! Is such a thing conceivable to God as a holy war? Alas. The words--the images--the effort is still uncomprehended. I said Light. I said truth. I said Freedom. I meant enlightenment. Yet nearly every church that uses my name is a wall against light and a rampart against enlightenment, using fear, not love, to chain the generations in terror and pain and ignorance . . . And now--this is called civilization, and in my name, also! — Philip Wylie

Thus, constriction and impoverishment of personality make it possible to avoid subjective conflict and concomitant anxiety. But the person's freedom, originality, capacity for independent love, as well as his other possibilities for expansion and development as an autonomous personality are renounced in the same process. By accepting impoverishment of personality, one can buy temporary freedom from anxiety, to be sure. But the price for this 'bargain' is the loss of those unique and most precious characteristics of the human self. — Rollo May

his view of perceiving God in Christ with the notion of looking at a painting and seeing what the artist has been doing in it.27 In Christian faith, the captivating force (the 'subjective evidence') of the artwork which is Christ takes hold of our imaginative powers; we enter into the 'painterly world' which this discloses and, entranced by what we see, come to contemplate the glory of sovereign love of God in Christ (the 'objective evidence') as manifested in the concrete events of his life, death and resurrection.28 So entering his glory, we become absorbed by it, but this very absorption sends us out into the world in sacrificial love like that of Jesus. This is — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Many such relations are carried on under the camouflage of love, that is, under a subjective conviction of attachment, when actually the love is only the person's clinging to others to satisfy his own needs. — Karen Horney

Ask one hundred people to explain love. And you'll get one hundred different answers. Because love is like art, it's subjective. Fluid. Ever-changing. Evolving. Case — Kim Holden

Here is God's purpose - For God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; is loving, not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated; is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Films are subjective - what you like, what you don't like. But the thing for me that is absolutely unifying is the idea that every time I go to the cinema and pay my money and sit down and watch a film go up on-screen, I want to feel that the people who made that film think it's the best movie in the world, that they poured everything into it and they really love it. Whether or not I agree with what they've done, I want that effort there - I want that sincerity. And when you don't feel it, that's the only time I feel like I'm wasting my time at the movies. — Christopher Nolan

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience. — Robert Wyatt

It is ironical that for all the value we give to the rational, life is primarily governed by the irrational. Love is not rational. Sorrow is not rational. Hatred, ambition, rage and greed are irrational. Even ethics, morals and aesthetics are not rational. They depend on values and standards which are ultimately subjective. What is right, sacred and beautiful to one group of people need not be right, sacred and beautiful to another group of people. — Devdutt Pattanaik

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I've never been in love before - I don't really know? I think I have. I guess it's subjective in that way. — Lady Gaga

I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter. — Steven Soderbergh

Our personal identities are socially situated. We are where we live, eat, work, and make love. [ ... ]
Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us. The expectations of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior. — Philip G. Zimbardo

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. — Erich Fromm

My whole life I wanted to be normal. Everybody knows there's no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only messy, inconsistant, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our own lives. But when I think about what I have, what I strived to reach my whole life, it's not the biggest or best or easiest or prettiest or most anything. It's not the Manor or the laundry closet. Not the multi-million dollar inheritance or the poorhouse. It's not superstardom or unemployment. It's family and love and safety. It's bravery and hope. It's work and laughter and imperfection. It's my normal. — Tori Spelling

Is it possible that love is all subjective, or all objective? — Bram Stoker

Separation of function is not to be despised, but neither should it be exalted. Separation is not an unbreakable law, but a convenience for overcoming inadequate human abilities, whether in science or engineering. As D'Arcy Thompson, one of the spiritual fathers of the general systems movement, said: As we analyze a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. We divided the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of the mind, according to the teaching of psychology, into component factors: but we know very well that judgement and knowledge, courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary coefficients, of a most complex integral.10 The — Gerald M. Weinberg

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... — Sylvia Plath

For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself. — Deepak Chopra

In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? "It was good for you; how was it for me?") — Steven Pinker

Religion is the secret of life. It teaches us to love, to serve, to forgive, to endure, and to interact with our brothers and sisters with empathy and compassion. Advaita (non-duality) is a purely subjective experience. But in daily life it may be expressed as love and compassion. This is the great lesson taught by the great saints and sages of India, the exponents of Sanatana Dharma. — Mata Amritanandamayi