Quotes About Observation

Conscious experience is very much like a movie. It's just one moment – one still – after another. But because these seem to occur in rapid succession, we adopt the contradictory belief … there are … persistent things out there that nevertheless change.

John Cleese once said that when they started Monty Python, they thought that comedy was the silly bits: "We used to think that comedy was watching someone do something silly . . . we came to realize that comedy was watching somebody watch somebody do something silly." That's the basis of the tool of Straight Line/Wavy Line.

Like there's actually a need for Greenland. You can get ice at 7-Eleven.

My most persistent memory of stand - up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford.

Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

Being on Twitter is like having a fern.

He knows only what is right in front of him; she is aware of every incoming sensation that glances obliquely against her soft, fragile core

Mirabelle knows, and she lets this be unspoken, that all free things require conversation. Sitting in a darkened movie theatre requires absolutely no conversation at all, whereas a free date, like a walk down Hollywood Boulevard in the busy evening, requires comments, chatter, observations, and with luck, wit. She worries that since they have only exchanged perhaps two dozen words between them, these free dates will be horrible.

The Feynman Dilemma A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny

I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don't know how they can do it.

A watched iPhone never syncs.

big brown eyeballs do a quick roll around the inside of the room.

El enfoque económico no pretende describir el mundo como cualquiera de nosotros quisiera que fuera, o teme que sea, o reza por que llegue a ser, sino más bien explicar lo que hay en la realidad. La mayoría de nosotros querría arreglar o cambiar el mundo de alguna manera. Pero para cambiar el mundo, primero hay que comprenderlo.

If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.

Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different.

La prueba de todo conocimiento es el experimento —dijo—. El experimento es el único juez de la "verdad" científica». La

When the eyes were watching, Bateson's colleagues left nearly three times as much money in the honesty box. So the next time you laugh when a bird is frightened off by a silly scarecrow, remember that scarecrows work on human beings too.

If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.

Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

Look to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways and be wise: Which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provides her meat in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest. —PROVERBS 6:6–8

When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight against the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably: from a neighborhood to an entire planet.

SUPERNOVAS AND COMETS (1572—1577)

PLANETARY MAGNETISM (1600)

TELESCOPE (1600--1610)