Quotes about observation

Silence is more than observation it informs from non-observation.

Look up at the moon don't think about yourself.

Open your eyes you will see the greatness of God.

I wouldn't even dare read the Torah, let alone attempt a witty observation on the Torah.

The English summer is never far away it's just above the clouds.

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.

The moon went slowly down in loveliness; she departed into the depth of the horizon, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars appeared. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and the advent of the dawn declared itself in the newborn blue of heaven. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as in our tempestuous life the transitory wreaths of sleep brook upon a

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in pri

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.

Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.

The irony of rule followers is they often quote a lot of people that do not follow as many rules as they do.

I would say inhuman, but your kind perfected the clockwork of murder long ago.

There is a coarse and ugly temperament and tenor observable in the common unconscious person.

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.

Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we've stopped enjoying our lives?

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

We don't think. We think we think.

Observation is a critical activity in the innovation process to understand the context of an issue from a human perspective.

It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition - or the hope - that on this scor

We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.

I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.

A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation

We develop our whole character from our thoughts, actions, attentive observations, and from the resolute pursuit of our inspirational dreams.

I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.

G. I. Gurdieff, "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"So-and-so-and-so-must-be; do-not-do-what-must-not-be. Mullah's favorite saying. p. 598

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Liberating a prejudiced mind from its preconceived notions and scripting a life of purposefulness requires constant postulation, observation, evaluation, and synthesizing.

Not everything that is seen is visible.

You are the observer who watches your emotions as they push, pull and stretch you.

The acts of observing and judging are necessarily solitary acts.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and record

The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.

Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see.

Our observer is not affected by emotional ups and downs, our personal life dramas, or by the events of the external world. It is our observer, at the core of our being, that teaches us to let go as we begin identify with it rather than with all the hubbub of our moment-to-moment experience and our mental chatter about it.

Let emotions happen naturally. If we try to control them they will never be released and will stick with us like a shadow. But if we can observe them with no judgement, no labels and when we do label them because it's difficult transmute them into positive creativity.

Horses don't speak, but they communicate through body language. If you look very closely, you'll find out your horse has been trying to talk to you every day.

Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself,"Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of 'em--cubs; and--""Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?" asked the Doctor."Why, of course!" said Jip. "And those are only a few of the easy smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could

Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It's as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. so when I'm observing that's what I'm watching for. The choices people make

The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

My eye sees sacred things.

A Romantic builds everyday fulfillment through tenacious observation of daily life and an abundance of reliance on intuition. The result: An extraordinary life lived in ordinary days.

You have to look closely to see clearly.

I was beginning to think that Simon just had a bad case of OCD, ADD, and PMS. With a little BS and OMG mixed in.

[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.

I think that the event which, more than anything else, led me to the search for ways of making more powerful radio telescopes, was the recognition, in 1952, that the intense source in the constellation of Cygnus was a distant galaxy—1000 million light years away. This discovery showed that some galaxies were capable of producing radio emission about a million times more intense than that from our own Galaxy or the Andromeda nebula, and the mechanisms responsible were quite unknown. ... [T]he pos

Walk slowly through the world and pay attention

The simple act of having a camera, not a cell phone, but a camera-camera, there’s a kind of a heightened perceptional awareness that occurs. Like, I could walk from here to the highway in two minutes, but if I had a camera, that walk could take me two hours.

To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to

One must always be aware, to notice—even though the cost of noticing is to become responsible.

They ask me, what will change if we change the perspective?I replied, “Everything.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.

The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be chara

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

I always notice flowers.

It was the most fleeting time of day, and maybe that was why it was her favorite. Because if you blinked, if you closed your eyes or turned your head for even the briefest of moments, you might just miss it. And like most things in life, the transient, fleeting nature of the moment made it all the more special.

He seemed like the type that kept people at arm's length, maybe out of arrogance or maybe from personal choice- either way, I wanted to know him so that those eyes were narrowed and focused solely on me.

Judging is acting on a limited knowledge. Learn the art of observing without evaluating.

Observe and learn from stronger and better people than yours instead of laughing and pulling legs of poor and weak than yours.

Science is not, as so many seem to think, something apart, which has to do with telescopes, retorts, and test-tubes, and especially with nasty smells, but it is a way of searching out by observation, trial and classification; whether the phenomena investigated be the outcome of human activities, or of the more direct workings of nature's laws. Its methods admit of nothing untidy or slip-shod; its keynote is accuracy and its goal is truth.

All this seeing.All this relentless taking in.

Christmas comes but once a year, starts in August ends in July

Poets make the best topographers.

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles.Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring. Their properties and consequences are well established and well understood consequences of quantum mechanics.

I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France, that I felt like collecting plants in a new world... The number of these leaves, the way they separated easily, and the great variety of plants whose imprints I saw, appeared to me just as many volumes of botany representing in the same quarry the oldest library of the world.

It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.

Chaos is peaceful when you stand quietly & watch - we are eternal observers, reflecting both tiny & vast, singing infinitely within.

We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.

Chaos is not the lack of order, it is merely the absence of order, that the observer is used to.

Those who believe they know it all should not fret when they ultimately realize they do not, for when there is nothing left to learn what challenges remain.

Try to pause each day and take a walk to view nature.

The unknown is scary the Unknown can also be exciting. Your life could change in an instant anytime. But sometimes, that change is the best thing that will ever happen to you.Maybe I don’t have to know what my fate is to know that everything will be okay. Maybe the not knowing is how we move forward. Wherever I’m headed, I know it’s exactly where I’m supposed to be.

You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light!

Learn to see what you are looking at.

I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.

Only when you observe with the intent to understand you will discover the deeper truth.

Observing the stream of eternal and simple truth is the same for all who look upon the fountainhead of consciousness.

There are many, many, many worlds branching out at each moment you become aware of your environment and then make a choice.

Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space. The object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element obeys. The theory of heat will hereafter form one of the most important branches of general physics.

The progress of science has always been the result of a close interplay between our concepts of the universe and our observations on nature. The former can only evolve out of the latter and yet the latter is also conditioned greatly by the former. Thus in our exploration of nature, the interplay between our concepts and our observations may sometimes lead to totally unexpected aspects among already familiar phenomena.

Most people he knew, his wife included, wouldn't make it through an hour on the promise of four sentences. But Frankie Bard was like a camel. She could hold her words for days--as long as she could watch the goings-on.

In a state of pseudo-death you restore your substance.

When you don't fit in anymore, eat less.

I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.

I was always observing. Even while talking, living, going through every motion, I was watching myself and the situation. That's a writer. Always observing.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

I like The Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.

Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as believers claim, the word "gospel" means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a journalist and free-t

There is no greater path than the act of listening, because the observer who listens can begin to see themselves as a part of one expression of purpose and beingness.

Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?

The more one thinks, the less one sees.

It's only because I've lived with brothers that I realize, after a moment, that he's not looking outside but rather inside, wrestling with something inside himself. And there's nothing for it but to wait.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

As if a great creature had grown old without being able to express its feelings. Not that it didn't know how to express them, but rather it didn't know what to express.

Love is a lens of an observer. Love is an attitude with action.

What we beileve is what we see.