Quotes About Observation

You think to protect Jacques by leaving him here with me as my bodyguard." "You see too much." "More than you know.

You have the most fascinating mouth I have ever seen. What's so fascinating? It's a mouth just like any other. I think it is your pouty lower lip. Now I know you're crazy. I never pout and neither does my lip.

By conversing about the weather, a job, just everyday things, whoever was listening would be able to ascertain a rythm to a voice. The way a person breathed. Their heartbeat. That would help indicate if they suddenly told a lie.

She had more practice than any other rider that she knew of in hiding how she felt, yet Ricco read her.

As she'd grown, she moved through life in silence, hoping not to be noticed, afraid of drawing attention to herself.

He wasn't going to get caught staring at her and reveal that she had the upper hand.

Don't talk to me about sense. i've been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony.

They're students. We might learn a thing or two if we talked to them occasionally.' Bryant stopped dead and studied his partner. 'Do you have any idea what they see when they look at us? Let me give you a clue. In Tanzania they discovered a dinosaur fossil 243 million years old. Add another couple of years on that, and that's how we appear to them. I smell of aniseed and tobacco and you tint the grey out of your hair.

people never change. What you think you see is what you see. See?

He glanced up and saw with horror that a tramp had wandered into the restaurant, and that the tramp was, on closer inspection, his partner.

Gathered together in this fashion, Jerry could see that the Whitstables possessed certain common physical characteristics, including wayward teeth, large earlobes, and the sort of stress-related blotchiness usually found in cornered jellyfish.

His unique skill had always been to absorb the talents and knowledge of others, use what he needed and discard the rest. He never allowed anyone to get to close. He kept the world at arm's length in order to look down on it.

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

The dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view, that the opposite is also true.)

George Orwell once observed that if Napoléon Bonaparte had been cut down by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, he would have been remembered as the greatest general since Alexander.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.

Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: "the power of facing unpleasant facts"). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is, that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual, is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Coincidence, said Louis Pasteur, has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it.

As soon as I entered the room, he cried out, without any other greeting: You've gotten very fat! It was his way of disarming, I thought, any horror I might have felt at his own pudding-like rotundity, which had trebled since I had seen him last.

Watching and listening up close, I saw nothing to suggest that if his brains were made of TNT they would generate enough explosive power to disarrange his hair.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

Oh, I know you. You're soft, like most men. You make up romances about people instead of seeing them as they are.