Quotes About Observation

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.

If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?

Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.

Everything - even mountains, rivers, plants and trees - should be your teacher.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

There is no stranger under the cherry tree.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

Vines and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees make fun of it?

What the eyes perceive in herbs or stones or trees is not yet a remedy; the eyes see only the dross.

Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.

How do you see those tree?... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bush beside you are not lost.

If you know the differences between an oak and a poplar, a spruce and a pine, down to the needles... you are able to paint that tree with more conviction, even if done with a few broad strokes.

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.

Yes, I do talk to my trees. I did say to one 'You'd better smarten yourself up or you'll be gone' and the next year, well, you've never seen such a mass of flowers.

When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

A fool does not see the same trees a wise man sees.

Halt looked up at the trees above him. "Why does this boy ask so many questions?" he asked the trees. Naturally, they didn't answer.