Quotes About Observation

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

It's very quiet but I'm aware that life is going on outside.

Since string theorists have failed to propose any way to confirm string theory experimentally, string theory should be retired

One of de la Vega's observations about the Amsterdam traders was that they were "very clever in inventing reasons" for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices,

conclusions:

I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

Take your eyes away for a moment, then let them return to the object of contemplation, and it is as if you were experiencing the effect for the first time.

Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I'd imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn't remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn't need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth.

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

In what bold relief stand out the lives of all walkers of the snow! The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectually as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbor, the fact is chronicled.

One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them…. It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

The next morning we saw nothing of the enemy, though we were still lying to.

Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.

Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear the world he lived in. Music, he said, is continuous; only listening is intermittent. John Cage, 1979, reflecting on Henry David Thoreau's solo sojourn in Walden Woods, 1845-47.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.

It is a promise which eminently deserves our observation that all who are united to Christ and acknowledge Him to be Christ and Mediator will remain to the end safe from all danger, for what is said of the body of the Church belongs to each of its members since they are one in Christ.

And here again we ought to observe that we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in the heart.29 For the Lord manifests himself by his powers, the force of which we feel within ourselves and the benefits of which we enjoy.

My final two cents worth of advice is to develop an all-consuming curiosity for things both exotic and ordinary. Read, observe, analyze, and become involved with a variety of interests. Study, practice, delve, probe, investigate, and above all, be flexible. Keep an open mind. The world is changing fast. Don't get caught in the corner of the ring. - Ward Kimball

I found the poems in the fields, And only wrote them down.

They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them.

My eyes were trying to tell me something that my brain refused to believe. They made their point. I was looking straight into another pair of eyes, human eyes, but large, flat, luminous. I have seen such eyes among the nocturnal creatures, which creep out under the artificial blue moonlight in the zoo.

To be a farmer is to be a student forever, for each day brings something new.

I have found in the past that what passes for coincidence is usually life's way of telling you that you're not paying enough attention.