Quotes About Observation

Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?

An aesthete does not necessarily dress well or collect art works: an aesthete is one who lives by the eye.

The bird still didn't move. Mrs. Yun thought it had discerned her deepest, innermost ideas. Actually, she herself didn't know exactly what those ideas were.

Karma has a surprising way of taking care of these situations. All you have to do is sit back and watch.

When it comes to people--don't write about who you know, but what you know of human nature.

It's like now that I'm looking for inequality, I'm seeing it everywhere, categorizing a thousand great and small unfairnesses everywhere I go. Why didn't I really see this before?

I can spot an underemployed lazy intellectual anywhere.

Because the floor numbers were listed next to the names and phone extensions of committee personnel, it was possible to calculate roughly who worked in proximity to whom. And by transposing telephone extensions from the roster and listing them in sequence, it was even possible to determine who worked for whom.

That's one thing I've learned: you think people are watching you, noticing things, but they're not.

G. K. Chesterton's observation: "The simplification of anything is always sensational.

Not my circus, not my monkey." Yancy

Jerry Crosby was looking out a window at the immaculate green yard, where a lawn worker's leaf blower had caught fire. The worker calmly heaved it in the swimming pool and ambled away.

That's no midget," the water skier said. "That's a real person.

What happened to your eye, young lady?" "I fell down the stairs. What happened to your hair?

As a reporter, Brian Keyes had come to know B.D. Harper fairly well. There was nothing not to like; there simply was nothing much at all.

Watch. Simply listen. They will not speak to us, but to one another they say much. Some of it, we hear. The rest is beyond words. I want to listen, to open to the possibilities.

Men saw in whales everything-except whales themselves.

Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.

Both Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.

two chimpanzees were observed maltreating a chicken: One would extend some food to the fowl, encouraging it to approach; whereupon the other would thrust at it with a piece of wire it had concealed behind its back. The chicken would retreat but soon allow itself to approach once again--and be beaten once again. Here is a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be uniquely human: cooperation, planning a future course of action, deception and cruelty.

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.