Observation Quotes - Page 21

• Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with.

  Mark Twain

  Suicide, Balloons, Commit

  Mark Twain (1992). “Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays: 1891-1910”, Library of America

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• I always made up my own acts; built them out of my knowledge and observation of real life. I'd had wonderful opportunities to study people; and every time I went out on the stage I tried to show the audience some bit of true human nature.

  W. C. Fields

  Real, Opportunity, People

  6 Copy quote

• Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth.

  Peter Medawar

  Unbiased, Innocent, Myth

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses.

  Galileo Galilei

  Opinion, Manifest, Persist

  14 Copy quote

• I delight to come to my bearings,... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sitthoughtfully while it goes by.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Independence, Delight, Nervous

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden”, p.276, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

  Eudora Welty

  Photography, Art, Honesty

  8 Copy quote

• [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

  Pierre Mac Orlan

  Photography, Artist, Documentaries

  7 Copy quote

• By sight and observation and thought, with the help of the camera, and the addition of the date of the year, we can hold fast the history of the world.

  August Sander

  Sight, Years, Cameras

  12 Copy quote

• When I used to watch vaudevillian impressionists, people like Rich Little or Frank Gorshin, I always felt like the voice was the only point. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be of the Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters model, where observation and storytelling was important.

  Frank Caliendo

  Winter, Voice, People

  5 Copy quote

• Dealing with architecture brings me very close to the state of mind required to make pictures. One also needs an old seeing eye, appropriate reflexes which embrace sensitive observations coupled with appropriate emotional responses.

  Max Dupain

  Eye, Emotional, Mind

  15 Copy quote

• The key to my work is that I stopped, physically, to observe something. I raised my camera and recorded my observations.

  Julius Shulman

  Keys, Cameras, Raised

  21 Copy quote

• Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.

  Larry Sultan

  Photography, Reality, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• If the best way to learn to succeed is to fail as fast as possible, then the second-best way is to watch someone else fail as fast as possible. Watching someone else screw up is a kind of rehearsal for your own eventual downfall. A close observation of someone else's attempt to resolve a difficulty is a great way to acquire real-world insight into whether and when to deploy their method in your own times of trouble.

  Cory Doctorow

  Real, Screw Ups, Watches

  4 Copy quote

• Before I went to bed, I sat up till 2 a-clock in my chamber, reading of Mr. Hooke's Microscopical Observations, the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.

  Samuel Pepys

  Reading, Book, Bed

  Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham (1985). “The Shorter Pepys”, p.464, Univ of California Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's likely that CO2 has some warming effect, but real proof of that hypothesis is tricky. You have to confirm by observation exactly how the CO2 changes the situation at different altitudes in the atmosphere and in different regions of the world. For example, CO2 is supposed to warm the upper air faster than the surface, but the measurements don't show that happening. When the CO2 effect is eventually pinned down, it will probably turn out to be weaker and much less worrisome than predicted by the global warming theorists.

  Nigel Calder

  Real, Air, Atmosphere

  4 Copy quote

• It does seem that the sea ice is returning to 'average' after the record lows of 2007 and 2008. There has been a definite recovery trend since then, so far from being a progression towards ice free summers it seems that it was a temporary dip. The recent observations do make the 2007 projections that the region would be ice free by 2013 look very unrealistic. Given what is happening only the foolish would look many years into the future and predict ice free summers now.

  David Robert Whitehouse

  Summer, Recovery, Average

  6 Copy quote

• I remain an active volunteer in the field of at-risk youth, so I'm pretty familiar with the landscape as it stands now, but I don't have any qualifications or an exhaustive body of research to back up my observations.

  Janice Erlbaum

  Volunteer, Risk, Research

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a sick kid, I always looked out the window. The objects of my observation were the sun, the seasons, the wind, crazy people, and my grandfather's death. During my long period of observation, I felt that something like poems were filling up my body.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Crazy, Kids, Filling Up

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well sometimes I do not listen to music. But when I do it could range from Frank Sinatra to Copeland. I spend a great deal of time playing the piano because it really is my salvation at times. But I am perfectly happy just going on a long bike ride that takes many days to complete and staying away from music for a bit. It always feels so fresh when you return to the instrument with a different observation of things than when you were last there.

  Tony MacAlpine

  Piano, Long, Different

  6 Copy quote

• The chicken noticed that the farmer came every day to feed it. It predicted that the farmer would continue to bring food every day. Inductivists think that the chicken had "extrapolated" its observations into a theory, and that each feeding time added justification to that theory. Then one day the farmer came and wrung the chicken's neck. This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusion.

  Bertrand Russell

  Thinking, One Day, Necks

  11 Copy quote

• A man of the best parts and greatest learning, if he does not know the world by his own experience and observation, will be very absurd, and consequently very unwelcome in company. He may say very good things; but they will be probably so ill-timed, misplaced, or improperly addressed, that he had much better hold his tongue.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Men, Doe, World

  4 Copy quote

• True observation begins when devoid of set patterns; freedom of expression occurs when one is beyond system.

  Bruce Lee

  Expression, Patterns, Freedom Of Expression

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee: Artist of Life”, p.123, Tuttle Publishing

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.

  Paul Theroux

  Knowing, Luxury, Feelings

  Paul Theroux (2012). “The Lower River”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that at times Imaginations are assigned to him which at first he must forego understanding; he must receive them as Imaginations and let them ripen in his soul as such. In spiritual experience, much depends on a man having the patience to make observations, at first to simply accept them, and to wait with understanding them until the right moment arrives.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Spiritual, Men, Imagination

  41 Copy quote

• A curiously interested observer sees a great deal, a scientifically interested observer is worthy of all honor, and anxiously interested observer sees what others do not see, but a crazy observer sees perhaps the most, his observation is more intense and more persistent, just as the senses of certain animals are sharper than those of man.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Crazy, Men, Animal

  7 Copy quote