Quotes About Observation

You always was a skinny child but turn sideways you just ain't there atall.

From the shade of the Ivy covered porch the old men sat in ladder back chairs and watched the hot blacktop. They'd sit day long and wait for something to happen, anything to happen, waiting for the road to entertain them. These were old man in clean shirts and suspenders and pants so roomy they could've held another old-timer and shoes split down the sides for comfort.

I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire, she said.

He who thinks all mankind is vile is a pessimist who mistakes his introspection for observation; he looks into his own heart and thinks he sees the world.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

This habit of actively collecting examples of other people's foolish behavior is an invaluable antidote to idiocy. In fact, it's the second great anti-stupidity technique we should learn from Munger.

The Jewish Talmud pro pounds this question, Why God made man vesperâ Sabbathi?—on the evening before the Sabbath? and gives this as one reason, ut protinus intraret in præ ceptum—that is, God made man on the evening just before the Sabbath, that he might forthwith enter upon the observation of the command to sanctify the Sabbath, and begin his life as it were with the worship of God,

The historian's observation is worth the Christian's remembrance: 'Crafty counsels promise fair at first, but prove more difficult in the managing, and in the end do pay the undertaker home with desperate sorrow.'[9]

Satan knows what orders thou keepest in thy house and closet, and though he hath not a key to thy heart, yet he can stand in the next room to it, and lightly hear what is whispered there.

The secret of life is paying absolute attention to what is going on. The enemy of life is distraction. If you're not present in the present, where the hell are you? Word of Wisdom No. 1.

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.

In the spring I'd shit with the door open, watching the blackbirds

Does quantum physics really say, he asked, that the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it? He found the idea that matter was described by probabilities especially upsetting. "God does not play dice with the universe!" he declared. To which Bohr supposedly replied, "Albert, don't tell God what to do.

Physicist Pascual Jordan added, "We ourselves produce the results of measurement." And, by extension, he meant reality itself.

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking is reported to have said, "Whenever I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I want to reach for my gun.

A smart man learns from experience; a wise man learns from the experience of others.

Someday someone is going to create a stir by proposing a radical new tool for the study people. It will be called the face-value technique. It would be based on the premise that people often do what they do for the reasons they think they do. The use of this technique will lead to many pitfalls, for it is undeniably true that people do not always act logically or say what they mean. But I wonder if it would produce findings any more unscientific than the opposite course.

exhibited the mannerisms of a nervous man. He had glanced around too frequently in the waiting area, had drummed his fingers on the bench, had tapped the boarding pass on his knee, had eyed every fellow passenger in the tree-shaded square.

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.

The humblest painter is a true scholar and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it…. It is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things;… to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.

Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction--they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.