Quotes About Observation

Immature thought is predominately purposive and utopian. Thought which rejects purpose altogether is the thought of old age. Mature thought combines purpose with observation and analysis.

She was a bit better to take than her husband, but she was a terrible cook and I seemed to be the only person at her dinner table that realized this.

Slowly the silent bird turned its head. It could do so, if it chose, through more than three hundred and sixty degrees.

Observe Everything. Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.

observe everything . . . ?trust nobody . . . ?despise your mother . . . ?effort is vulgar . . . ?things were better in the eighteenth century.

forced to observe the fringes of unconsciousness and make darkness visible;

And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself.

What do you see when you look and what do you hear when you read?

Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.

But of a sudden his head went up; his stiff-poised brush broke into swift wagging; his lips curled down. He had recognized that his prospective foe was not of his own sex. (And nowhere, except among humans, does a full-grown male ill-treat or even defend himself against the female of his species.)

All my life I have made an intensive study of dogs. Thirty years ago I knew everything about them that could be known, and much more. After three decades of much closer study of them and their ways, I find to my dismay that I know almost nothing at all about them. I have scarcely scratched the surface. That is not false modesty. It is sickeningly true. The sum total of my canine knowledge and experience and observation is this: Anything can happen; and usually it does.

Then, his odd collie sense had told him that for some reason this staggering and hiccuping creature was not the master whom he knew and loved. This man was strangely different from the Link Ferris whom Chum knew. Puzzled, the dog had halted and had stood irresolute.

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different

I'm glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I've read.

the world wasn't made for us to think about it (to think is to have eyes that aren't well) but to look at it and be in agreement.

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside. But what is it, a row of trees? It's just trees. Row and the plural trees aren't things, they're names.

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing. I know they smell just as well as I know I existed. They're things known from the outside. But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.