Quotes About Observation

Black weather, Cucumber fruit swells, Rooks sit. - 11th March, 1768

If it wriggles, it's biology. If it smells, it's chemistry. And if it doesn't work, it's physics.

Well it seems to me

wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?

When people such as Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands, they were coming from a society that was more powerful than the one they were studying. In the City of London, financiers were far more powerful than journalists or anthropologists; the challenge was how to "study up.

wakefulness

Where you are standing—your spot on the ground amid this vast world—and what you choose to look at from there means absolutely everything.

Once back home I would adjust my lens to the resolution through which I perceived the people and provinces of the globe. My daily commute, the supermarket check out line, neighborhood walks, pedestrian tasks of any job would inspire me as much as the stir of white linen canopies in Venice's Piazza San Marco; the velvety dunes of the eastern Sahara; Bali's kaleidoscope of color; my Vietnamese sisters.

To help bring the rest of reality into focus and put the feeling in its proper perspective, we can ask ourselves: "Is there space around the feeling? How big is that space? Can I make that space even bigger? What is that space like? Is peace there? Is love there? Is compassion there? Can I be that space? What's it like to observe the feeling from the perspective of space? As space, what can I discover about this feeling? Can I, as space, give love and compassion to the feeling?

Tenendosi a braccetto, alcune ragazze formavano a volte delle catene tutte femminili di cinque o sei. Strane, mi dicevo, guardandole. Nell'attimo che le incrociavamo, scrutavano attraverso i cristalli coi loro occhi ridenti, nei quali la curiosità si mescolava a una specie di bizzarro orgoglio, di disprezzo appena simulato. Davvero strane. Belle e Libere.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see.

ARANO Al campo, dove roggio nel filare qualche pampano brilla, e dalle fratte sembra la nebbia mattinal fumare, arano: a lente grida, uno le lente vacche spinge; altri semina; un ribatte le porche con sua marra pazïente; ché il passero saputo in cor già gode, e il tutto spia dai rami irti del moro; e il pettirosso: nelle siepi s'ode il suo sottil tintinno come d'oro.

Ci sono cose, pensò, che i nostri occhi guardano senza vedere, ma il subconscio le vede e le nota. Il subcosciente ha l'occhio della macchina fotografica e non gli sfugge niente. Tanto è vero che, alle volte, dopo un sacco di tempo ci ricordiamo di aver visto un particolare che non sapevamo di aver visto.

I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.

You're fond, I imagine of your right eye? I mean, you've gone to the trouble of putting make up on it.

I'm the whitest guy you will ever meet. The first time I saw an African-American, my dad had to tell me to stop staring.

British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century conception of the Panopticon, a building design he believed would allow institutions to effectively control human behavior.

I was so busy enjoying the change in you, I didn't notice it in myself.

Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Your daughters are watching you.

I soon developed myopia and a firm belief that people in books were not only more interesting but more real than people outside of books.

So I sat down and began to make notes about many trips, past and present, that left me amazed by what is, angered by what isn't, and hooked on what could be.

one writerly habit was describing everything I did, no matter how absorbing or how trivial, as if I were standing outside myself and watching.

the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy