Quotes About Observation

Experience seems to come from a distance.

It is to be noted that a deserted street at four o'clock in the afternoon has as strong a significance as the swarming of a square at market or meeting times.

There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.

Science is facts.

We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day.

Whatever happens at all happens as it should thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch closely.

In the world of nature we find the poets moved even to passion by objects that we hardly notice, or from long familiarity have come to ignore. Their strong emotion arises from their fresh vision.

Political parties serve to keep each other in check, one keenly watching the other.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

We fail to praise the ceaseless ministry of the great inanimate world around us only because its kindness is unobtrusive. Nature is always noiseless. All her greatest gifts are given in secret. And we forget how truly every good and perfect gift comes from without, and from above, because no pause in her changeless beneficence teaches us the sad lessons of deprivation.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.

He declined to point out 'what appear to us as defects', on the grounds that 'most of them will be obvious' and he had no wish 'to feed the malevolence of little or lazy critics'.1

he was able to laugh at his weakness for fiddly words. When he and Boswell were in the Highlands and passed through Glen Shiel, Boswell described a mountain as 'immense', but Johnson corrected him—'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.' NICETY     1.

If I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience and experience only," I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."