Quotes About Observation

People most often don't see what is right before them.

You learn something new every day, if you just stop to pay attention.

He studied his two friends, taking note of their freshly bruised countenances. 'All right. What happened?

Le duc finit son verre, puis énonça cette remarque : — Ce qui me plaît dans l'essence de fenouil, c'est qu'il n'y a aucun autre mot qui rime avec. Avec fenouil. — À moins qu'on ne change de genre, dit Lalix.

When you're young,' Harry said, 'you just see things. There's nothing much to say about them. You don't realize then all the life that's gone into it.

Hannah kept her eyes forward, trained on two rows of rusted showerheads stuck in facing walls. Sixteen in all. The room was paved with white tile, chipped and discolored by age and use.

What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.

It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, "OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.

the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you'll see coming back.

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect ineffable.

Then Miss Turner noticed Rosie was a bit hot and flushed. Probably only the start of a summer cold.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

Te montrer à l'univers, le temps d'un éclair, puis m'enfermer avec toi, seul, et te regarder pendant l'éternité.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.

THE OBSERVATION THAT good people suffer, and evil people keep enjoying benefits and recognition, is short-sighted. Also, this kind of conclusion might have been made in haste. If one analyses carefully, one finds that troublemakers are definitely not happy. It is better to behave well and take responsibility for one's actions, and lead a positive life.

Sed quis custdiet ipss custds? (Juvenal Sat. 6.347–48:

People who record birdsong generally do it very early--before six o'clock--if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud.

Hazel, like nearly all wild animals, was unaccustomed to look up at the sky. What he thought of as the sky was the horizon, usually broken by trees and hedges.