Richard A. Shweder Quotes

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

If you think there is anything in theater that objectively exists without your point of view attached, you are wrong.

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

Your frame of reference is what you see.

Reality is a concept that depends largely upon where you point your face.

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.

Life's all about perceptions.

I just can't help but see things differently.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

I’ve never found the truth to be fair and balanced.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.

Objectivity in the end is an unattainable ideal.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

I always think that's neat, when you can hear a story told from different points of view, different perspectives.