Quotes About Observation

I had made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. The kind who never asked you for faith, hope and charity, but offered you facts, proof and profit.

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.

Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work.

She saw the man below looking at her, she saw the insolent hint of amusement tell her that he knew she did not want him to look at her now. She turned her head away.

had stood there silently, watching, without interest or purpose, like a chemical compound on a photographic plate, absorbing visual shapes because they were there to be absorbed, but unable ever to form any estimate of the objects of her vision.

There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything.

She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.

she could not pay him the tribute of hostility. He knew that he disliked her violently. But he watched the shape of her mouth, the movements of her lips framing words; he watched the way she crossed her legs, a gesture smooth and exact, like an expensive instrument being folded; and he could not escape the feeling of incredulous admiration he had experienced when he had seen her for the first time.

She could not attend her university, which was closed; she could not earn money, because public work for women, save a few specialized jobs, was forbidden; she couldn't even go on a walk through the neighborhood and watch the finches dart from tree to tree.

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves. I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement—for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him.

I'd met my share of highly credentialed, high-IQ morons

I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.

As I watched the two of them disappear into dusk, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.

in the state capital. But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention

her eyes narrowed as she searched my face like a doctor examining a patient for symptoms.

We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts.

Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.

I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.

That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner—or more sociable—than that?

Barbara Ehrenreich

Inadvertently, I had stumbled across what has been called the Harvard law of animal behavior, which is related to Murphy's law: You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases.

Profesorii, p?rinÈ›ii È™i psihologii au observat o sc?dere abrupt? a capacit??ii de a p?stra atenÈ›ia, atât în rândul adulÈ›ilor, cât È™i al copiilor. Un studiu din 2015 a constatat c? durata medie de atenÈ›ie a adulÈ›ilor a sc?zut de la 12 la 8 secunde, adic? mai puÈ›in decât poate fi atent un caras auriu.

That was the trouble with war, the Hawk thought detachedly:

When you've learned to both see and not see the resemblance, then you see the uniqueness.