Quotes About Observation

A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—not oftener.

Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another.

Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and jimpson weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted:

bees wouldn't sting idiots; but I didn't believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me.

I happened to think of something. I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on his back, but on his face. So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap, but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes. So

If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong to them. I'm satisfied with it. It's a good enough tick for me. Sho, there's

They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.

Truly, seeing is believing - and many a man lives a long life through, thinking he believes certain universally received and well established things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but only thought he believed them.

Well, it rained mortar and masonry the rest of the week.  This was the report; but probably the facts would have modified it.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it. But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?

What a dim-witted slug the average human being is.

We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so

So I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

Damn these human beings! If I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.

There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a pictured face is intended to express. There is not one man in five hundred that can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not mistake some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted assassin on trial. Yet such people talk of character and presume to interpret expression in pictures.

Light them both —I'll have to have one to see the other by.

But how should I know whether they were boys or girls?" "Goodness sakes, mars Clay, don't de Good Book say? 'Sides, don't it call 'em de HE-brew chil'en? If dey was gals wouldn't dey be de SHE-brew chil'en? Some people dat kin read don't 'pear to take no notice when dey do read.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine

What an ass you are! he said. Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane.