Quotes About Observation

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.

He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: "Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?" I replied: "I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth." "Well," he asked, "what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?" —ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE,

FRANCISCUS: How sweetly she looks! Oh, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy.

Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgements, And should give certain judgement what they see; But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders Of common things, which when our judgments find, They can then check the eyes, and call them blind.

Didn't laugh as loud or as often. Smith, too, had seen more

A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing.

Of those who say nothing, few are silent.

H?ristiyan kilisesi ad? verilen kuram?n pagan mitolojisinin kuyruÄŸuna tak?l?p yeÅŸerdiÄŸini gözlemlemek ilgi çekicidir.

There are days when I intentionally don't write. For instance, I never write when I'm traveling, because travel is a situation where I can learn more by looking and listening than by working.

He had spent forty years noticing that when women cut their hair short, other women would say it was "cute" or "smart" or some such thing, but he had never, in any of the thousand times when he'd seen it, heard anything approaching approval by any male.

I always tell travel writing students to use these early hours to explore, because one's surroundings—the colorful drinks, the melodic sirens, the sweet-and-foul smells—will not be as clear or as sharp in a few days. At the start, everything stands out as if in high definition, especially, strangely, if you're groggy from jet lag or insomnia.

After half a day in a place—especially a foreign country—you've learned more than from all the books and articles you've read.

In meditation there must be a staying of the thoughts upon the object. A man who rides quickly through a town or village: he minds nothing. But an artist who is looking on a curious piece views the whole portraiture of it, he observes the symmetry and proportion, he minds every shadow and color.

If your mind jumps to crazy story ideas from little things you see all around you, you might be a writer.

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

It was a great moment on board when two large boobies were spotted above the horizon to westward

Thornton W. Burgess

Thornton W. Burgess

Thornton W. Burgess

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: Behold! These things are. Yet most dramatists employ it to say: This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.

There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

Everybody should eavesdrop once in a while. There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.