Quotes About Observation

Jess rode at a moderate gallop along the trail. It wasn't long before he saw the huge house off to the side of it. He halted his

And sure enough, there it was, not the sought-after needle, but, to my agreeable astonishment, the haystack in the field by the lane.

Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

I wish I were there to watch the operations and changes; but alas! I am in Kansas scratching for a living.

We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.

Xander could sense more than David's smile. He wished he could be more like that, easygoing. But then, David hadn't seen what Xander had seen.

The guiding self shows intentionality and intelligence; but it is as if the intentionality and intelligence is a phenomenon that only appears when an observing ego notices a kind of behind-the-scenes design to the multiplicity of affects, dreams, visions, and patterns of behaviors. Thus, the intentionality of the guiding self may be likened to a consciousness in potential because it depends upon being perceived by an observing center of existing consciousness—the ego.

They fly by like a train window:

If your IQ was one point lower, you'd be a plant,' was Steve's only comment.

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.

when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.

fellows are just naturally interested in a good piece of work and have no unnatural restrictions in looking it over. Perhaps, and may the sahibs of the Fogg forgive me for thinking it, this simple, curious outlook of healthy men is more important than some of the monuments themselves.

The skilled observer, not the machine, was the essence of conservation.

the task of the ethnographer is not to determine "the truth" but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others' lives.

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. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

No thanks." Lucas watched the boy hop back onto the street and hold out the tinfoil for his friends' inspection.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, having to do with the fact that the very act of observing something changed the position and course of the thing being observed—at least on the subatomic level.

Lucas watched the boy hop back onto the street and hold out the tinfoil for his friends' inspection.

Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small "t." Big "T" Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.

For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.

Henry James wrote brilliantly about story art in the prefaces to his novels, and once asked: "What, after all, is an event?" An event, he said, could be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table and looking at you "that certain way.

Art consists of separating one tiny piece from the rest of the universe and holding it up in such a way that it appears to be the most important, fascinating thing of this moment.

Seeing what is not effective is effective for understanding what is effective.

Where the slanting forest eaves, Shingled tight with greenest leaves, Sweep the scented meadow-sedge, Let us snoop along the edge; Let us pry in hidden nooks, Laden with our nature books, Scaring birds with happy cries, Chloroforming butterflies, Rooting up each woodland plant, Pinning beetle, fly, and ant, So we may identify What we've ruined, by-and-by.