Quotes About Observation

Chance I is completely impersonal; you can't influence it. Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore. Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

Experimental ideas are very often born by chance as a result of fortuitous observations.

I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much – in just standing and staring.

That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.

Over the years I knew her she always looked at me like that - as though I was a quite pleasant but amusing object - and it always did the same thing to me. It's difficult to put into words but perhaps I can best describe it by saying that if I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.

Hariot would make a detailed record of the New World in writing, and White would undertake a series of illustrations and paintings. Together they would be Ralegh's ears and eyes in America.

One secret of leadership is that the mind of a leader never turns off. Leaders even when they are sightseers or spectators, are active not passive observers.

We should begin thinking of events as the primary realities and of time as an abstraction from them—a concept derived mainly from regular repeating events, such as the ticking of clocks. Events are perceived, but time is not (Gibson, 1975).

But then, of course, one can peek through the fingers, which is not only pleasurable but a lesson in practical optics.

One sees the environment not with the eyes but with the eyes-in-the-head-on-the-body-resting-on-the-ground.

Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

than meets the eye! 79 Don't worry, Fearless Reader—he was framed and eventually demonstrated his innocence. 80 I don't want to tell them their jobs, but if I were an astronomer, I'd keep my eye on Planet X. I think it might be trouble. 81 Primarily because it

You've got haired," he said. "Must be that cold Scottish weather.

I just saw a squirrel I used to know, but I'm not sure he recognized me. Last line of 'Season of the Witch

Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.

Stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was.

There's a shark. Following the ship.' I tried not to look, but couldn't help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green. We walked back to the deck chairs. Walter, we'll have to wait. Till the moon comes up.' I guess we better have a moon.' I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight.

Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.

given the loose-fitting clothing of the time, perhaps a great deal of Zacchaeus would have been visible to the crowd below.

His eyes had seen it all. He was 24 years old.

Watch for contradictory information (page 37).

World exists in the form of audience. A world is not all that is the case, but that which determines all that is the case. An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it. No one determines who an audience will be. No exercise of power can make a world. A world must be its own spontaneous source. "A world worlds" (Heidegger). Who must be a world cannot be a world.

There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (Heisenberg).