Quotes About Observation

There's plenty of life down there. The trouble is, it sees us coming and steps aside.

When elephants choose to dance, it is the wise man who gets out of the way.

Half happy. We wander among Mayflowers, among the lonely paths in the woods. We hover over gatherings of people, over the scene of accidents, gardens, festivals. We cower in chimneys of dwelling places and behind the bed curtains. Give me your hand. We don't associate with each other, but we see and hear everything that is going on in the world. We know that everything is stupidity, everything that men do and contend for, and we laugh at it.

MELCHIOR- Je te dirai tout.-Je le tiens des livres, je le tiens d'illustrations, et aussi d'observations faites sur nature. (L'éveil du printemps)

Music is always a commentary on society.

If we believe we're being watched, we're far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer.

Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.

Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.

Eavesdropping is such a regular-person activity.

I hadn't noticed the tiles in the regular-size house. They were painted to look like flowers. I saw the dollhouse better than I'd seen the real room. That was because it was small and concentrated. Gentleman Jack had told me about distillation, how you take a liquid and boil it so that at the end there's less liquid but it's purer. It's more truly its own self.

But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what's going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny.

In other words, what is salient to us—such as our own facial features—may not be salient to other species.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny.

Werner Heisenberg put it, "what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal

At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

If people laugh at primates at the zoo, they do so, I suspect, precisely because they're unsettled by the mirror held up to them.

In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)

Young female primates are as infant-obsessed as girls, whereas male interest in infants reflects an almost technical curiosity rather than a nurturing tendency. Young male chimpanzees often carry babies in an awkward manner without letting them cling to their bodies as ape babies love to do. I have watched in horror as young males inspect a small infant by stretching its limbs to the limit, sticking their big fingers down its throat, or making it the object of a tussle with a male peer.

We now know that dogs and horses yawn in response to human yawns—dogs do so even if they only hear their owner yawning—and that yawns often spread among monkeys in a group. We

American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)1

The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny.

What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.