Quotes About Observation

Bi oju ri enu a pamo. Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

Is there a feeling as love at first sight ? and if there be, in what does its nature differ from love founded in long observation and slow growth? perhaps its effect are not permanent; but they are, while they last, as violent and intense. We walk the pathless mazes of society vacant of joy till we hold this clue, leading us though that labyrinth of paradise and our nature dim like to an enlightened touch sleeps in formless blank till the fire attain it

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

Playboy : Have you ever taken LSD yourself? McLUHAN : No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.

The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.

Com diu John Berger en el seu fantàstic assaig «Per què mirem els animals?», estan fets perquè els animals hi estiguin exposats tothora a la nostra mirada (encara que els zoos actuals s'han < -o potser hauria de dir animalitzat?-, en disposar zones ocultes a la mirada de l'espectador), però també perquè no puguin mai retornar-nos la nostra mirada, o en tot cas, retornar-nos-la en situació d'igualtat.

Els zoos, com diu John Berger en el seu fantàstic assaig «Per què mirem els animals?», estan fets perquè els animals hi estiguin exposats tothora a la nostra mirada (encara que els zoos actuals s'han «humanitzat» -o potser hauria de dir animalitzat?-, en disposar zones ocultes a la mirada de l'espectador), però també perquè no puguin mai retornar-nos la nostra mirada, o en tot cas, retornar-nos-la en situació d'igualtat.

Stepping back from the Dictator and the Wild Child and becoming the Watcher is like thinking you've been stuck on a railroad track, able to move only backward and forward, and discovering that you had the capacity to fly all along.

The good news is that you can step off the battlefield any time. You do this by aligning yourself with the Watcher part of your brain, then observing the conflict from a kind, detached distance. The more time you spend observing the battles, the less energy the war will have, and the sooner it will end. Strange but true: the brain that observes itself, changes itself. A

The color white is not always what it seems to be. Watch for white handkerchiefs, handmade altars, homemade gumbo, and light summer dresses.

Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.

I attended a breakfast meeting with Fielding...half way through...the cork of nausea abruptly popped in my throat. I only just made it to the adjacent can, which was large and acoustical; my imitation of an exploding hippopotamus came through the closed door in full quadraphonic. I got one or two funny glances on my return ..and if I were them, I'd enjoy the spectacle. It does my poor ticker good to see someone really totalled.

Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches.

The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.

After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing them. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you that much.

Eight years ago, I wouldn't have painted this subject I'm starting now: a clearing filled with grasses. It would have seemed too much of a jumble. I had to keep looking and drawing, and looking. Now, because of all that time I spent drawing these grasses, I know what I'm looking for.

What, then, is a portrait painter painting? An individual who persists though time, or merely the way a ceaselessly mutating human organism appears in a particular time and place? It is a good question. …

It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses [this something else]. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself.

You could tell by looking at them they were all fucking British squaddies.' I

The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.

It hardly sounds like France," he said. "Paris never was France," she said.