Quotes About Observation

le regardait avec un respect attendri, mais pas trop fixement pour ne pas chercher à percer le mystère de ses supériorités.

If Albertine's lips were closed, her eyelids, on the other hand, seen from the point at which I was standing, seemed so loosely joined that I might almost have questioned whether she really was asleep. At the same time those drooping lids introduced into her face that perfect continuity, unbroken by any intrusion of eyes. There are people whose faces assume a quite unusual beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes

draw upon his knowledge of the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.

But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word.

which there was already installed a lady with a massive face, old and ugly, with a masculine expression, very much in her Sunday best, who was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. Notwithstanding her commonness, she was eclectic in her tastes, and I found amusement in asking myself to what social category she could belong; I at once concluded that she must be the manager of some large brothel, a procuress on holiday. Her face, her manner, proclaimed the fact aloud.

a man of great ability will ordinarily pay less attention to other people's foolishness than would a fool.

There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze.

Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of 'real life')

I had been struck, as we came away, by the discovery that this young man, so generous when he was far less rich, had become so stingy.

Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.

The impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression.

Não advertia que aquele detalhe verdadeiro tinha ângulos que só podiam encaixar-se nos detalhes contíguos do fato verdadeiro de que imprudentemente o destacara e que, quaisquer que fossem os detalhes inventados entre os quais o colocasse, sempre revelariam, pela matéria excedente e os vazios não preenchidos, que não era ali o seu lugar.

And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside?

it was like what used to be called a panopticon but a panopticon of years, a view not of a monument but of a person situated in the modifying perspective of Time.

since the beauty of human beings is not like the beauty of things,

Hata, ba?kalar?n?n tatl?l???na, zekâs?na kay?ts?z kalmam?zd?r.

When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form;

I saw all the male guests take up the similar carnations that were lying by their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their coats. I did as they had done, with the air of spontaneity that a free-thinker assumes in church, who is not familiar with the order of service but rises when everyone else rises and kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees.

A necessidade de falar impede não só de escutar mas também de ver, e nesse caso a ausência de qualquer descrição do meio exterior é já uma descrição de um estado interno.

It was the time when well-bred people observed the rule of affability and what was called the rule of the three adjectives.

He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew,

Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (to leave out of account the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature upon the rest), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

The peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here,