Quotes About Observation

A fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes—that is all the drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language, either.

Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

To observe processes and construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar . . . . Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present

Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they were famous throughout the ancient world.

À posteriori: reasoning from observed facts to general conclusions. À priori: reasoning from general propositions to particular conclusions.

Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa15—"Let us think no more about them, but look once and pass on.

I'm thinking that, collectively, men are only slightly more observant than mollusks.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

We become what we behold.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

David Gascoyne once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate of the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great significant events in the world at large.

Charbonneau was an interesting, amusing and provocative man and I like to think he brought out the best in me, also. Even two minutes in his company provided some comment or observation that would make me laugh or make me violently disagree with him and so those two minutes of my day were well spent as a consequence.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Say it! No ideas but in things.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts alight and scatter– Who are these people (how complex the mathematic) among whom I see myself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?

Observe the jasmine lightness of the moon.

Meanwhile, the old man who goes about gathering dog-lime walks in the gutter without looking up and his tread is more majestic than that of the Episcopal minister approaching the pulpit of a Sunday. These things astonish me beyond words.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences freshly and with the appearance of reality – This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –

She was herself in that moment of life when, to the middle-aged observer, at least, a woman's looks have a charm which is wanting to her earlier bloom. By that time her character has wrought itself more clearly out in her face, and her heart and mind confront you more directly there. It is the youth of her spirit which has come to the surface. I

In his eulogy, the Marquis de Condorcet observed that whosoever pursues mathematics in the future will be guided and sustained by the genius of Euler and asserted , with much justification, that all mathematicians...are his disciples.