Quotes About Observation

A woman's body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother's, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went into and out of it, and as I grew up, I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself.

My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down.

I was playing Russell Long, the senator from Louisiana. I had 12 speech teachers watching me. All the other passengers on the airplane were speech teachers, and every time I got it wrong, one of the speech teachers would jump up and correct it.

They put a young panther into the cage. The food he liked was brought to him without hesitation. He seemed not even to miss his freedom. The joy of life streamed from his throat with such ardent passion that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not ever want to move away.

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.

And although cars and motorcycles zipped around, all he saw was the girl coming toward him like a scene in a movie.

Hanisch, der mehr Bilder

Actually Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did. The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out by just sitting there, instead of checking the horse. A

Look at those vines,' he said. 'Nature is wearing her prettiest clothes.' The effect of this unexpectedly poetic observation was slight spoiled when Massot cleared his throat nosily and spat, but he was right;

A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

Real cognitive science, however, is necessarily based on experimental investigation of actual humans or animals. We will leave that for other books, as we assume the reader has only a computer for experimentation.

We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish. —John Culkin

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

Estamos tan ciegos que, mientras el mundo nos observa y da muestras de desaprobación, no somos capaces de visualizar la gran brecha existente entre nuestras palabras y nuestro proceder en la vida cotidiana.

an open-plan cubicle kind of thing-working, doing something, writing some Lisp program. And he'd come shuffling in with his ceramic mug of beer, bare feet, and he'd just stand behind me. I'd say hi. And he'd grunt or say nothing. He'd just stand there watching me type. At some point I'd do something and he'd go, "Ptthh, wrong!" and he'd walk away. So that was kind of getting thrown in the deep end. It was like the Zen approach-the master hit me with a stick, now I must meditate.

If it's reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.

It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.

Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don't have any of those things. They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.

All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.