Quotes About Observation

I don't have a philosophy. I have a camera.

Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

Philosophy begins with the understanding that you cannot just observe or experience and then report what you see, because how you conceptualize and symbolize alters experience.

We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle

Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

When you're coming up with your philosophy and approach to performing comedy, you take special note of the things you disagree with as much as the things you agree with.

I get a feeling of peace from a low so high, as I sit in my chair and watch life go by.

Everybody has their own approach. I don't adhere to any one philosophy. I learn a lot from life and people - watching and other people watching.

The first business of philosophy is to account for things as they are; and till our theories will do this, they ought not to be the ground of any practical conclusion.

Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.

The minute hand moves faster than you think it does.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one's gaze.

All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.