Quotes About Observation

What we think of the one shapes what we think of the other. If you find that you think there is nothing more to reality than what lab experiments uncover or our eyes see, a little additional thought should show that this claim itself is not the sort of thing that lab experiments could ever uncover or eyes ever see.

If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.

My wife says I'd get philosophical with a lamp post if I thought the thing had ears.

Pay attention: what you need to know is usually in front of you. There are no secrets, just things people choose not to notice.

The other line moves faster.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

When all is said and done scholars can do no more than find in nature what is already there.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

Somehow, though he moves right in front of me, I don't see him; quietly but surely he's active, and I miss it.

Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes.

It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

midafternoon— and wait and watch.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?" the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. "They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders." Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.

Nearly all people in nearly all nations, for nearly all of human history, he observes, have been poor. Widespread poverty is not an anomaly. But widespread affluence is.

He thinks I don't pay attention. He has been talking and I have been silently naming the scents of everything we are crushing under our feet as we walk.

I move one seat closer to the couple on the bus. They are holding hands but she is looking out her window and he is looking at his lap. They don't seem to be mad at each other.

We drove past our old house," the woman told me, "and I noticed that the tree he had watered through the droughts and cared for over the years had been cut down. He must have noticed too. I didn't say anything. I thought, 'I won't talk about it until he does,' but he didn't say a word.

Today I noticed a slim bar of soap lodged deep in the throat of the sink. My fingers can't reach that far down the drain. It is leaching away into the water, every day.

Sometimes he gives a little flourish with his fingers that makes me wonder if all his movements are a quiet performance.

an engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world

Observing what is around us and registering errant impressions is a state not so much of passive inaction as of alert receptivity. Allowing ourselves to notice, to be open to our surroundings, is a way of awakening our curiosity in the world outside ourselves. The

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.