Quotes About Observation

looked into Putin's eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge.

That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see.

I turn my head from side to side.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.

Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.

Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.

Appena arrivata credeva in cima ai grattaceli ci stessero dei tizi che vedevano tutto quello che succedeva e non sarebbero mai scesi a parlarle. Poi aveva scoperto che non c'è nessuno che sa quello che succede.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing – and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job.

I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was.

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it.

Was Quality something that you "just see" or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn't see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?

Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren.

The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world's eyes, the world already in one's own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime. But

If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the