Quotes About Observation

I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.

photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall.

From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière , sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.

My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

beyond observing that some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth ("Tell me," says Osberg's little glitana to the Moors, El Motela and Ramera, "what is the precise minimum of hairs on a body that allows one to call it 'hairy'?")

Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.

His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say Prenez donc une des ces poires. La bonne dame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer. Or: Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que j'exècre.

Egy elegáns elsÅ' osztályú fülkében, egyik keszty?s kezünket bedugva a bársony ajtóhurokba, könny? nagyon világlátott embernek érezni magunkat, miközben nézzük a szorgosan elsuhanó tájat.

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.

Now the colored pencils in more detail.

her husband had such a soothing capacity for showing how silent a man could be if he strictly avoided comments on the weather.

beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar.…

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque, A dull dark white against the day's pale white And abstract larches in the neutral light.

Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet.

I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know—trying to see things as you will remember having seen them)

The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.

not to spell very well, but to smell very well

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless