Observation Quotes - Page 28

• Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.

  Nicole Krauss

  Hurt, Memories, Fall

  Nicole Krauss (2003). “Man Walks Into a Room”, p.138, Anchor

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• The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.

  John Dewey

  Wisdom, Mistake, Thinking

  John Dewey (1998). “Experience and Education, 60th Anniversary Edition”, p.69, Kappa Delta Pi

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• It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die." His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

  Douglas Adams

  Nice, Exercise, Brain

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, p.100, Pan Macmillan

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• The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

  John Berger

  Medicine, Soul, Mountain

  John Berger (1995). “Adventure of painting”

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• All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Dream, Men, Animal

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• The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul It’s not essentially dependent upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

  Vaclav Havel

  Thinking, Soul, Mind

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• Observing and understanding are two different things.

  Mary E. Pearson

  Two, Understanding, Different

  Mary E. Pearson (2009). “The Miles Between”, p.98, Macmillan

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• His skin was a pretty colour, it made me jealous. Jacob noticed my scrutiny. What?" he asked, suddenly self-conscious. "Nothing. I just hadn't realised before. Did you know, you're sort of beautiful?" Once the words slipped out, I worried that he might take my implusive observation the wrong way. But Jacob rolled his eyes. "You hit your head pretty hard, didn't you?" "I'm serious." Well, then, thanks. Sort of." I grinned. "You're sort of welcome.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Beautiful, Jealous, Eye

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• Hope clouds observation.

  Frank Herbert

  Hope, Ambition, Clouds

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.17, Penguin

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• One’s lover is one’s partner in observing and understanding the world. Marriage is a place where joint narratives are composed. If the lover is a liar then all your joint observations are unreliable. You will have to start all over again.

  Philippa Gregory

  Liars, Understanding, World

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• It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.

  Alain de Botton

  Company We Keep, Expectations, Curiosity

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• ...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.

  Jennifer Donnelly

  Teenager, Unique, Thinking

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• (An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Discrepancies Between, Unhappy Childhood, Preparation

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• There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

  Stephen Hawking

  Winning, Differences, Religion

  "Stephen Hawking on Religion: 'Science Will Win'" by Ki Mae Heussner, abcnews.go.com. June 7, 2010.

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• I was so furious I was actually dizzy with it. There were so many bitchy, sarcastic observations to make, I was having a sarcasm stroke. "My God! You people! You're - you're so stupid you're making my eyeballs throb. They're throbbing, dammit!

  MaryJanice Davidson

  Sarcastic, Stupid, Sarcasm

  MaryJanice Davidson (2010). “Undead and Unfinished: A Queen Betsy Novel”, p.114, Penguin

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• Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.

  Louis Pasteur

  Life, Business, Past

  Address at inauguration of Faculty of Science, University of Lille, Lille, France, 7 Dec. 1854

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• No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Creativity, Science

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• My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Summer, Mother, Memories

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.3, Hamilton Books

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• The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Children, Memories, Stress

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• Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Art, Real, Men

  Evelyn Underhill (2017). “The Complete Christian Mystic: A Practical, Step - By - Step Guide for Awakening to the Presence of God”, p.112, Lulu Press, Inc

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• She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

  David Nicholls

  Notebook, Coffee, Believe

  David Nicholls (2009). “One Day”, p.104, Hachette UK

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• Detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, your's and mine.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Ambition, Abstract, Description

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• Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.

  Jonathan Stroud

  Ignorance, Together, Panic

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• All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Reflection, Self, Ideas

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Baldwin (2004). “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings”, p.170, Psychology Press

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• There is no ideal in observation. When you have an ideal, you cease to observe, you are then merely approximating the present to the idea, and therefore there is duality, conflict, and all the rest of it. The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe. The experience of the observation is really an astonishing state. In that there is no duality. The mind is simply - aware.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Ideas, Mind, Conflict

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