Quotes About Observation

ELLIPTICAL ORBITS (1605--1609)

JUPITER'S MOONS (1610)

LAW OF FALLING BODIES (1634)

MICROORGANISMS (1674--1680)

Amazingly, life went on largely undisturbed as Chesbrough's team raised the city's buildings. One British visitor observed a 750-ton hotel being lifted, and described the surreal experience in a letter: "The people were in [the hotel] all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping—the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption

Umwelt is the technical term34 for the sliver of the data stream that we normally apprehend. It's the reality our senses can perceive.

Remarkably, though sadly predictably, British psychiatrists still cling to the psycho-social model that has subverted meaningful research for the past 30 years, establishing the validity of Max Planck's observation that science progresses one retirement at a time.

The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

sconser n. A person who looks around while talking to you to see if there's anyone more interesting about.

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

That is why when the stars are out they are visible but when the lights are out they are invisible and why it is that when I wind up my watch it starts, but when I wind up this poem it ends.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of…"), but with a contenful observation that provokes curiosity

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it's a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.

The observation that conflict is part of the human condition, banal though it is, contradicts fashionable beliefs.

Third, children do pick up the pattern.

Benjamin Franklin observed, "So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.

Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science.

Even the humdrum rationality of seeing rather than hallucinating is in the service of the ever-present goal built into our visual systems of knowing our surroundings.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of . . ."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

I love going to the movies; I love watching good movie actors. They must know something I don't.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

I see you watching me like a hawk. I don't mind about the things you talk. But if you touch me something's got to give. I live the life I love and I love the life I live.

To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love.