Quotes About Observation

"If you think we're waxworks," he said, "you ought to pay, you know. Waxworks weren't made to be looked at for nothing. Nohow!"

When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.

"If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think."

He thought he saw an AlbatrossThat fluttered round the lamp:He looked again, and found it wasA penny postage stamp."You'd best be getting home," he said,"The nights are very damp."

Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces.

The word 'year' is meaningless as applied to a physical system by itself: it is not the stars or the planets that experience years, still less measure them, but man. This very observation is the result of man's attention to recurrent movements, seasonable events, biological rhythms, measurable sequences. When the idea of a year is projected back upon the physical universe, it tells something further that is important to man: otherwise, it is a poetic fiction.

Mr. Raney named the porpoises - Sister Woman, and Renford, and Lamar, and St. Elmo - and could recognize them, and call each by its name, even at night, six feet long, some of them, with a million sharp teeth and a naughty grin. Often when he floated past in the boat and watched their playful wheeling, in and out among the cypress knees, he called out to them, "Lamar, we are all alone in the world!" or "Renford, cork is an export product of India!

I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Ghosts are all around us. Look for them, and you will find them.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.

I think a lot of L.A. is something like USC - this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC - guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away - I've seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.

Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.

I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

When I taught, the way in which we got evaluated is what I used to call the drive-by evaluation. Somebody would come in for 20 minutes with a checklist, and that would be your evaluation. So it was clearly a snapshot.

It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.

Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.

When society starts moving in a way that becomes very negative, whether it's in the West or any other place, I've always found that it's very useful to have people around who actually know what's happening.

Pilots are useful. You just learn things during a pilot - the piece of casting that just wasn't right or things about the storytelling nature.