Quotes About Observation

The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once.

THE MOST POWERFUL impression you get in a dissecting room is that the human body is not a wondrous piece of precision engineering. It's meat.

were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace.

Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, We are monitoring the situation closely. For this, read: We are watching them die.

Almost no one ever notices it, but our thumbs are on sideways. The thumbnail faces away from the rest of the fingers.

I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age.

Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws.

The second thing that can be said with regard to life expectancy is that it is not a good idea to be an American.

Mientras hacía este libro aprendí sobre todo dos cosas. La primera es que no existe nada, ni una sola cosa, que no sea increíble e interesante cuando te detienes a examinarla... La otra cosa que aprendí es que tenemos una suerte bárbara de estar aquí.

I know we're not the first to discover this,' Gene Cernan radioed back from about 29,000 kilometres, 'but we'd like to confirm, from the crew of America, that the world is round.

I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.

Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.

Her close-cropped hair is now completely gray. Her eyes are probing but kind.

In the corner of the room, the triumvirate of my top aides sits in observation: the chief of staff, Carolyn Brock; Danny Akers, my oldest friend and White House counsel; and Jenny Brickman, my deputy chief of staff and senior political adviser. All of them stoic, stone-faced, worried. Not one of them wanted me to do this. It was their unanimous conclusion that I was making the biggest mistake of my presidency.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

Calvin: I'm a genius. I can't believe how smart I am. ...I've got more brains than I know what to do with. Hobbes: So I've noticed.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

The fly lands on the swatter. The movie runs backwards and catches fire in the projector. This species apes us well by talking only about itself

I can see one of them clearly now, walking along with a newspaper tucked under his arm. he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissue with a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek

the curve of her young shoulders and the tilt of her downcast head would make her appear to be terribly alone and if you were there to notice this, you might go down as the first person to fall in love with the sadness of another

For I, too, am a serious student of cartoons.

The boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him as if he were afraid or expecting someone