Quotes About Observation

The only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.

Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est;

the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards.

He sat there silent, watching their love expire.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.

The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.

What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved.

People who learn some correct detail about another person's life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion with it whatsoever.

My mother repressed a shudder of apprehension, for, being more rapid in perception than my father, she grew alarmed on his account over things which only began to vex him a moment later. Whatever might cause him annoyance was first noticed by her, just as bad news of France is always known abroad sooner than among ourselves.

M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.

I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But

Like a rare species of shrub in a tub, near the carriages, in front of the porch where I was waiting, stood a young page who amazed the eye as much by the remarkable harmonies of his coloured hair as by his plant-like skin.

That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung.

the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know well, if a passer-by who is 'putting me on the right road' shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap

I think that Françoise disbelieved me, for, like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by signs imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create. There was, then, embedded in my