Quotes About Observation

She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips—it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.

All my life had taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to have committed itself to keep astare

If you knew some of the people he does have!" Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be compared to Sir Claude.

They were in presence of Chad himself.

From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity - creation.

I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!

She wouldn't remember that at a certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.

A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water. And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.

he saw that it wasn't just a circus, but an arena, just like everywhere.

When a portrait commences badly it's because you're not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.

Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show.

Looking at a fragment of The Millennium the other day, I pointed out . . . how hallucinatingly real were the oranges.

It didn't matter to me whether I was intact or falling to pieces. I was attending a spectacle: the crumbling of our civilization.

The capital of the new planet—the one, I mean, which will kill itself off—is of course Detroit. I realized that the moment I arrived. At first I thought I'd go and see Henry Ford, give him my congratulations. But then I thought—what's the use? He wouldn't know what I was talking about.

The sooner the gardener loses certain kinds of innocence the better, and there is no better place to begin than with the weather.

Squirrels are blamed for many crimes they are not responsible for, but in this case honesty compels me to say it was the squirrels done it. I saw them.

Think not, because no man sees Such things will remain unseen

Anybody could have seen you. I was just unlucky.' He realised what he'd said and added hurriedly, 'I mean not unlucky to have seen you that way. I mean you're very pretty, beautiful and all that, no spots or anything...' - Henry

Wishful thinking sometimes had an influence on observation, even trained observation.

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.

A couple of years ago, leaving a restaurant near the Louvre, I held the door for a black man in a camel overcoat. Only as he passed did I realize it was the rapper Kanye West.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.