Quotes About Observation

Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.

Virgil was not a man to take time to look at the stars, not when he might miss a nickel on the ground in the process.

It was like finding oneself under the scrutiny of a stuffed bird. His

gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face.

discovered that silence made a lot of people uneasy, and they would often say something to break it, thus revealing themselves in the process.

One ignored the mundane at one's peril.

It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes Present the object, but the Mind descries. We see nothing till we truly understand it.

God's nothing more than a twelve-year-old kid with an ant farm. He's always watching, but He's never gonna do anything.

She slipped from her tall chair (why don't we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, door knobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

never sit in the first row at the ballet.

Yet, despite the symmetry of the laws of Nature, we observe the outcomes of those symmetrical laws to be assymetrical states and structures.

As we look way back into the first instants of the Big Bang, we find the quantum world that we described in Chapter 3. From that state, where like effects do not follow from like causes, there must somehow emerge a world resembling our own, where the results of most observations are definite. This is by no means inevitable and may require the Universe to have emerged from a rather special primeval state.

Thoughts well up in our mind moment by moment. But we refrain from doing anything with our thoughts. We just let everything come up freely and go away freely. We don't grasp anything. We don't try to control anything. We just sit.

stories are everywhere, just waiting to be found...

The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them.

wonder is the mother of all science.

The way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and intellectually suspect.

Traditional education tended to ignore the importance of personal impulse and desire as moving springs. But this is no reason why progressive education should identify impulse and desire with purpose and thereby pass lightly over the need for careful observation, for wide range of information, and for judgment is students are to share in the formation of the purposes which activate them

The vine of pedant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.

He looked off into the distance with narrowed eyes. Man of action, seeing things no one else does. "Let's just say we had indications…" and he let it dangle in the air, as if mystery were the ultimate justification.

I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.