Observation Quotes - Page 18

• Several country towns, within my observation, have at least a dozen taverns. Here the time, the money, the health and the modesty, of most that are young and of many old, are wasted. Here diseases, vicious habits, bastards and legislators are frequently spawned.

  John Adams

  Country, Taverns, Dozen

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• Crafty men condemn studies; Simple men admire them; And wise men use them: For they teach not their own use: but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

  Francis Bacon

  Wise, Simple, Men

  Francis Bacon (1949). “The Essaies of Sir Francis Bacon”

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• What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind?

  Wade Davis

  Buddhism, Years, Mind

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• Antiquities, or remnants of history, are, as was said, tanquam tabula naufragii: when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

  Francis Bacon

  Book, Names, Stories

  Francis Bacon, Basil Montagu (1825). “The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England: A New Edition:”, p.107

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• General observations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater care and caution, lest, if we take counterfeit for true, our loss and shame be the greater when our stock comes to a severe scrutiny.

  John Locke

  Loss, Jewels, Care

  John Locke (1828). “An essay concerning human understanding ... The twentieth edition, etc”, p.559

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• Inventive man has invented nothing -- nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds.

  Dorothy Thompson

  Men, Law, Bird

  Dorothy Thompson (1957). “The Courage to be Happy”

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• I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.

  Peter Wright

  Thinking, Drawing, People

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• It has been my observation and experience, and that of my family, that nothing human works out well.

  Don Marquis

  Work Out, My Family, Wells

  Don Marquis (2013). “The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel”, p.395, Doubleday

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• Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.

  Abigail Adams

  Ignorance, Men, Parent

  Abigail Adams, John Adams (1840). “Letters of Mrs. Adams: The Wife of John Adams”, p.197

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• Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there's not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they're one of the boys, I think. I don't want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it's a fair observation.

  Colin Firth

  Boys, Thinking, People

  "Then She Found Me - Colin Firth interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.

  John Trudell

  Writing, People, Personal Experiences

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• My observation is China is thinking more as a global player than regionally, in both politics and economics.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Player, Thinking, Economics

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• I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Art, Thinking, Years

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. September 30, 2009.

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• I cannot resist making the observation that some people use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - more to lean on than for illumination.

  Alfred E. Perlman

  Illumination, People, Drunk

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• We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

  Bergen Evans

  Want, Hypothesis, Conform

  The Natural History of Nonsense A Tale of a Tub

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• Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Ideas, World, Process

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• Imagination should give wings to our thoughts but we always need decisive experimental proof, and when the moment comes to draw conclusions and to interpret the gathered observations, imagination must be checked and documented by the factual results of the experiment.

  Louis Pasteur

  Wings, Giving, Imagination

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• ...academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there's no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot - and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.

  Paul Krugman

  Stupid, Taken, Ideas

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• Please don't make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea. You don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art or to write beautiful things... science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated.

  Tim Minchin

  Beautiful, Art, Stupid

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• There are three types of men in the world. One type learns from books. One type learns from observations. And one type just has to urinate on the electric fence himself.

  Will Rogers

  Book, Men, Three

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• The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Philosophy, World, Fool

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• All data are filtered, observation is necessarily 'theory-laden'.

  Norwood Russell Hanson

  Data, Theory

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• Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observations.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Results, Hypothesis

  Augustus De Morgan (1872). “A Budget of Paradoxes Reprinted, with the Author's Additions, from the Athenaeum Augustus De Morgan”, p.55

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• To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love.

  Jean Shinoda Bolen

  Voice, Creative, Soul

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• True wisdom is plenty of experience, observation, and reflection. False wisdom is plenty of ignorance, arrogance, and impudence.

  Josh Billings

  Ignorance, Reflection, Arrogance

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