Quotes About Description

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. It is, as Ruskin says, 'not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.' . . . I have to say the words, describe what I'm seeing. . . . But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.

I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.

Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.

His shaggy homespun overcoat was swinging open, stuffed with long envelopes and periodicals which protruded from the pockets. He looked no older; perhaps a shade less sane.

Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.

I quite feel that an apology is due for beginning a novel with two long dull chapters full of description.

refuting a merely contentious argument—a description which applies to the arguments both of Melissus and of Parmenides: their premisses are false and their conclusions do not follow.

The landlady was a fiftyish woman in a plum-colored kimono.

Round-headed, he muttered. Brachycephalic, gray-eyed, black-haired, with suggestion of the negroid. Celtic, I presume?

He was a well-grown, handsome man, with a splendid forehead

The further points, that he is middle-aged, that his hair is grizzled

The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

Die Vorstellung der Welt ist, wie die Welt selbst, das Produkt der Männer: Sie beschreiben sie von ihrem Standpunkt aus, den sie mit dem der absoluten Wahrheit gleichsetzen.

It is possible to experience true divine wonders in your conversion but never to be taught a true description of what your experience is. Then someone starts to describe your experience in words you have never heard, and in ways you have never understood, and suddenly the strange words all sound exactly right.

I'm a very passionate believer in the unity of knowledge. There is one world of reality - one world of our experience that we're seeking to describe.

when we talk about the Background we are talking about a certain category of neurophysiological causation. Because we do not know how these structures function at a neurophysiological level, we are forced to describe them at a much higher level. There

No one but a fool, and only a fool of a peculiar description, feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his.

In any conceivable method ever invented by man, an automaton which produces an object by copying a pattern, will go first from the pattern to a description to the object. It first abstracts what the thing is like, and then carries it out. It's therefore simpler not to extract from a real object its definition, but to start from the definition.

But why attempt to describe charms which all feel, but none can appreciate?

Nicolaus of Damascus to Strabo of Amasia: My dear old friend, you have been eminently correct in your descriptions and enthusiasms over the years – this is the most extraordinary of cities in the most extraordinary of times.

the first time in 15 years of television around the globe that a real life homicide had occurred in front of live cameras…. The Dallas shooting, easily the most extraordinary moments of TV that a set-owner ever watched, came with such breath-taking suddenness as to beggar description.

Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

Era una bellissima fanciulla, di quindici o sedici anni, alta e flessibile come un giunco, dalla pelle pallidissima, quasi alabastrina, con la tinta che ricordava suo padre il Corsaro Nero; aveva due occhi grandi, d'un nero intenso, e lunghe ciglia che lasciavano cadere sul viso la loro ombra. I suo capelli, neri come l'ala di un corvo, li teneva sciolti sulle spalle, legati solamente presso la nuca da una piccola fila di perle.