Quotes About Observation

Everything that has eyes will cease to see

It is important to be on the alert for "the decisive moment," says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

My 'Movember' moustache was never going to be as big as Nigel Mansell's, but I tried my best. The amazing thing is that when you try to grow a moustache, you notice everyone else's. There are some amazing moustaches on the grid.

Believe none of what you hear. Half of what you see. And everything you write.

Christine always wanted to know what was afoot, and any matter on which she was prevented from giving her opinion she took to be going badly.

I am intrigued by the smile upon your face, and the sadness within your eyes

The artist, that is to say, begins by looking to the world around him, and then, on the basis of his powers of observation, offers some perceptual account of it for our appreciation.

I felt myself becoming angry too easily. I once saw a couple at a restaurant, and I could tell from their mannerisms that they were having some type of disagreement. I got mad at the guy and wanted to tell him, "Come on – appreciate your wife!

There are many ways to tell if someone is a bit thick. You can sit them in a room and ask them to push various bits of plastic into a wooden box. Or you can ask them to describe a cloud. Or you can carefully measure the distance between their eyes, the height of their forehead or the length of their arm.

Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is coming because the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my new friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.

What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?

You can tell when they're coming for you if you study their faces.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands, and there is no knowledge that is not power.

They examine me like I'm a cow at a 4-H auction. I try not to moo.

even in his own house, a man cannot use his eyes without danger.

Discovery is the ability to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.

It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.

From the way Denny's shaking his head, he's either got an injured shoulder or a gnat in his eye.

Watching a spring training game is as exciting as watching a tree form its annual ring.

He watched me breathe. He knew my breath.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.