Quotes About Observation

La fotografía es, antes que nada, una manera de mirar. No es la mirada misma

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience

the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera

camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions

This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images.

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: 'There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.

Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle.

Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives, he told them. Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.

Look and look and don't ever forget. Now, close your eyes. Here, give me your hand. And just feel. Can you feel the Earth move?

I've never understood tourism. Where is the value in standing by and watching others live their lives?

She visited her father all the time. She'd stepped over piles of clutter, but it had never occurred to her that Pop was having serious problems. As time went by, his carelessness had increased, but Rosa hadn't thought anything of it.

She kept sneaking looks at him. He had strong, chiseled features, his jaw softened by a day or two's growth of beard. And those shoulders. She'd always been a sucker for a guy's strong shoulders. Big square hands that looked as if they did harder work than writing biographies. No wedding band. At thirty, Isabel couldn't help noticing a detail like that.

walking again. But being inconspicuous on

I mean that two of any thing is a most uncomfortable number. One may do as he pleases. Six may get along well enough. But two must always struggle for mastery. Two must always watch each other. The eyes of all the world will be on two, uncertain which of them to follow.

Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

He smiles but rarely and watches other men to see when they laugh and then does the same.

but as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.

the idea that the Ancients had a different way of relating to the world, that they experienced it as something that interacted with them. When they observed the world, the world observed them back.

Strange," said Henry Woodhope, "where did you get this nonsense?" "From the man under the hedge. Henry, you do not listen." "And he seemed honest, did he?" "Honest? No, not particularly. He seemed, I would say, cold. Yes, 'cold' is a good word to describe him and 'hungry' another.

I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.