Quotes About Observation

If we allow our high creativity to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.

We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.

In this way I have sat in many rooms and walked in many gardens, and it has been as though I were a stick of furniture or a branch of a tree. I seem to have caused no sense of restraint or embarrassment. People have been able to talk freely in front of me, almost as freely as though I weren't there. I suppose some might think this a great compliment; it has given me a curious feeling of nonexistence. Now

I don't believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.

You just look at things nobody else can see,' Dennys added, 'and listen to things nobody else can hear, and think about them.' Meg defended her mother. 'It would be a good idea if more people knew how to think. After Mother thinks about something long enough, then she puts it into practice. Or someone else does.

A. J. Wheeler. He says: "Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as 'sitting out there,' with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we must shatter the glass.

A quiet man, wearing those shorts that only Americans wore, shorts that did nothing for the bottom or the legs, but only pointed out the ridiculous nature of the human figure.

I'm surprised you didn't have her in white with half a dozen trainbearers," Louis said under his breath. Lena flashed him a smile as if he had said something warm and encouraging instead of sneering. Ivy was very quick on the uptake, she would notice if Lena glowered.

Slightly at a loss, Louis turned to talk to someone else. Young women didn't normally walk away from him like that. Stevie had been watching; he saw the way Louis had laid his hand on Kit's arm with his easy familiar charm. It had made Stevie rage inside.

When's your birthday, Eric?" Lisa asked. "This August," he said. "You and Cassie both have summer birthdays," Kelly observed. "She's in late August." "You two are both turning sixteen

If you go too fast you might not notice everything. On the other hand, you don't want to be late.

I don't want to trudge up insane mountains or through war-torn lands. Just a nice stroll through the hill and dale. But now I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see in a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.

Oh, Tocqueville, you're the man.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work.

There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.

Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.

he waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid's face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? this is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

Puzzle Number One: Why can't we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

Taleb likes to invoke Popper: 'No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

The Power of the Glance Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.

and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked

this is why Gottman has couples talk about something involving their marriage — like their pets — without being about their marriage. He looks closely at indirect measures of how the couple is doing: the telling traces of emotion that flit across one person's face; the hint of stress picked up in the sweat glands of the palm; a sudden surge in heart rate; a subtle tone that creeps into an exchange.

It's the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It's judgment And what Blink is — what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to — is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.