Quotes About Observation

The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) understood what he was seeing at the time of a lunar eclipse: 'The church says the earth is flat, but I know it is round for I have seen its shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than the church.

When you track, you're creating causal connections in your mind, because you didn't actually see what the animal did. That's the essence of physics.

He was willing to wait until the last dollar was broken: in the meantime he was content. You never know the soul of a city, he said, until you are down on your luck. Now, he felt, he had been here long enough to understand her.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Things aren't ever what they seem to be when you first look at them. What's important is that you keep your mind wide open and try to understand what's going on from a lot of different angles.

I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.

Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.

If there's any greater exhibit of the malleability of human nature than the sight of someone standing, absently waiting for the light to change at a deserted intersection, I don't know what it is.

I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.

A wandering carpenter, called Stone, saw on his travels a gigantic old oak tree standing in a field near an earth-altar. The carpenter said to his apprentice, who was admiring the oak: "This is a useless tree. If you wanted to make a ship, it would soon rot; if you wanted to make tools, they would break. You can't do anything useful with this tree, and that's why it has become so old.

If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk. If you make a fool of yourself in front a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too.

What makes them even more astonishing is that there is compelling evidence that the only time quanta ever manifest as particles is when we are looking at them.

I am reminded, now, of Leonardo's advice to painters: You should fix your eyes, he says, on certain walls stained with damp. You will see in these the likenesses of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, extensive plains; and you will see there battles and strange figures engaged in violent actions. For in such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of church bells, in whose reverberations you may find every word imaginable.

The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.

That's what happens when you love someone... you notice and notice and notice.

What could she tell him? I notice everything about him, from his flawed nose to his battle scars to his eyes as blue as an upland lake at midsummer. Sometimes I see the boy he would have been had it not been for his life at Ragmarket. He wears his pain on his face in unguarded moments; at other times, I can see just how dangerous he is. No, she couldn't say any of that.

He'd always found that he learned more if he kept quiet.

She spotted Cam Staunton in his dress blues, scouting the dessert table. As she watched, he scooped up two biscuits and stuffed them into his mouth. When he turned and saw Lyss watching, his face went scarlet, which contrasted nicely with the powdered sugar around his mouth.

He sat in the other chair, taking advantage of the opportunity to take another good look at her. Her fawn-colored hair was sun-streaked from long days spent outdoors. Now it was done up copperhead style, the multiple braids decorated with beads and feathers. One braid per kill—wasn't that the rule?

I don't get it. It's a bunch of trees with leaves.

That bastard c'n spot a gnat from three miles off, an' then read its mind.

It doesn't escape her notice that the only person she trusts is a journalist she's known for a few days. What does that say about her life and the people in it?

Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?

I will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of tomorrow's rain by the rustle in the sycamores.