Quotes About Observation

I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.

I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw.

Als we ons met de instelling van de reiziger [met ontvankelijkheid als voornaamste kenmerk] door onze eigen omgeving bewogen, zou deze wellicht niet minder interessant blijken dan de hoge bergpassen en de oerwouden vol vlinders in Humboldts Zuid-Amerika.

How seldom we notice rooftops; how easily our eyes are drawn to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church.

If drawing had value even when practiced by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see -- that is, to notice rather than to merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it.

Human beings sometimes interest me but I don't like them because they are not intelligent enough.

Every skillful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses - and in so doing prompts us to find and savour those in the world around us.

An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects – an ostensibly generous gesture nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, since it is no simple thing for any human being to honour over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office or the adjoining aeroplane seat.

Watching crowds step off the escalators and onto the concourse, I thought it miraculous that in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her--as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should be precisely she whom I needed to find.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.

What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes.

A genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

as we have seen, what

Dragostea pare delimitat? de dou? disolu?ii - via?a sub prea multe priviri ?i via?a sub prea pu?ine.

Jarenlang kwam ik bij het boodschappen doen langs een huis dat weliswaar een van de lelijkste gebouwen was dat ik ooit heb gezien, maar me ook meer over architectuur heeft geleerd dan menig meesterwerk.

Les jumeaux nous apprirent les attitudes des grandes personnes en train de fumer: la tête devait être un peu en biais, l'oeil droit à moitié fermé, la cigarette entre l'index et le majeur, le bout du filtre à peine calé enre les lèvres. Il fallait prendre son temps entre deux bouffées, faire semblant de discuter à grands gestes avec les autres.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

A few years ago she never would have noticed what Norman was doing. Or anyone else either. And if she took note of it now it was because she knew more of people's feelings than she used it. And could put herself in someone else's place.

Solo quello che vedi con la coda dell'occhio ti tocca nel profondo. (E.M. Forster)

16 December. In his book The Poetics of Space (1958) the critic and philosopher Gaston Bachelard quotes the advice of a dictionary of botany: 'Reader, study the periwinkle in detail, and you will see how detail increases an object's stature.' 'To use a magnifying glass', Bachelard comments a little later, 'is to pay attention.' (From The Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford.)

Watching people behave is nothing special; watching them trying to behave is always fascinating.

Rachel was becoming adept at sensing when something was going unsaid by adults: it was as if there were an invisible object sitting amid their visible words and Rachel was learning to judge its shape and size by feel alone.

Time reveals character.