Quotes About Observation

One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses.

In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.

A cripple's life is one of watching others do what he can't do

And more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I was thinking, when I looked back—up the nighttime mountain—at the wrecked train, lying in the snow.

When your job's to make sure nothing ever happens," he'd once heard, "you begin to see nothing happening

He who follows the feathered inhabitants of the forest and plains, however rough or tangled the paths may be, seldom fails to obtain the objects of his pursuit, provided he be possessed of due enthusiasm and perseverance.

Saturday you might see your dad in a T-shirt, your brother might be asked if he'd like to throw a ball around, and from a corner of the lawn you might sit and watch, wild with the wrongness of being a girl, wild with stoppered grace.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

O let me lead her gently o'er the brook, Watch her half-smiling lips and downward look; O let me for one moment touch her wrist; Let me one moment to her breathing list; And as she leaves me, may she often turn Her fair eyes looking through her locks auburne.

Then felt I like like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent upon a peak in Darien

To be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies[-] [it] forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations [on] the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist...

Do I believe the total perversion that I am witnessing?

Mr. Gonzalez watched Mr. Zalatimo probing his long index finger high into one of his nostrils. What would this one do? His feet tingled with fear.

After all, I do not believe that one must necessarily scrape bottom, as it were, in order to view his society subjectively. Rather than moving vertically downward, one may move horizontally outward toward a point of sufficient detachment where a modicum of creature comforts are not necessarily precluded.

I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.

couples who swayed and dipped around the Gibraltar of a wallflower, Ignatius.

So that's who that obvious appendage of officialdom was. He looked like an arm of the bureaucracy. You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.

Miró agradecido la nuca de Myrna, la cola de caballo que golpeaba inocente sus rodillas. Gratamente. Qué irónico, pensó Ignatius. Y, tomando la cola de caballo con una de sus manazas, la apretó cálidamente contra su húmedo bigote.

Le verità lapalissiane dell'economia non hanno verità scopritori; esse sono evidenti a chiunque abbia occhi per vedere.

I can measure the motions of bodies," Sir Isaac Newton once observed, "but I cannot measure human folly." Nor could he do so as regards his own. He was to lose

Reporter lady: What's that color? John: Hm. I'd call this a color!

Doing fine. Watching shadows on the wall.

You can't keep quiet about anything that's going on in the world, unless you're a monk. Sorry, monks! I didn't mean it!

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing." Athenians found "the fruits of other countries" to be "as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own." The walls made their citizenship global.