Quotes About Observation

The point was that you have to look at the world as it is, not as some elegant theory says it ought to be.

To me, coming from applied mathematics, a theorem was a statement about an everlasting mathematical truth—not the dressing up of a trivial observation in a lot of formalism.

Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.

When looking at nature, you must always consider the detail and the whole.

We do not know space. We do not see it, we do not hear it, we do not feel it. We are standing in the middle of it, we ourselves are part of it, but we know nothing about it.

I want to find happiness in the tiniest of things - a minute moss plant, 2 cm across, on a rock - and I want to try to do what I've been wanting to do for so long, that is, to copy these infinitesimally small things as precisely as possible and to be aware of their size.

No amount of photography could replace the memories of a life lived, of lives observed and known, of lives elaborated in the mind and on the page.

And I thought of the Transit of Venus: that though the bodies be vast and distant, and their motions occult, their hesitations retrograde, one could, I thought, with exceeding care and preparation, observe, and in their distance, know them, triangulate to arrive at the ambits of their motivation; and that in this calculation alone, one might banish uncertainty, and know at last what constituted other bodies, and how small the gulf that lies between us all.

It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we would see all the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.

The hand that records is also what makes everything unclear.

While he wrote the fourth and final movement of the symphony, an artist who lived in the apartment above him started sculpting a bust of him. Shostakovich sat uneasily while he was being sculpted. He couldn't sit still. His fingers kept tapping as he played scales and chords on his cheeks.

not the quickest bunny in the centrifuge?

Lily asked, "What do you mean when you say Number One's eyes were different?" "Like a cat's eyes. You know what a cat's eyes look like?" "No," said Katie. "Because my cat is so completely lazy I've never seen her eyes actually open." "Which?" said Lily. "Trish?" "She didn't move for a week. Dad thought she was dead. We were about to bury her when someone noticed the chicken was missing from the counter.

One thing i hate about being smart is that you notice everything even when someone is trying to fool you.

The more I see of men, the better I like dogs.

Plus je vois le homes, plus j'admire les chiens" (The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs).

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before? What answer would my father give?

Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.

did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me?

he continued, "Elidûc said to me, 'When you meet Sindérian Faellanëos, observe her well, for then you will be privileged to see the most gifted young wizard of her generation.

Diane St. John had once said he looked as if he would speak in poetry, should he ever deign to speak at all.

Powersnoop," as one of my wry young patients calls it,

I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.