Best 292 quotes in «observation quotes» category

A Romantic builds everyday fulfillment through tenacious observation of daily life and an abundance of reliance on intuition. The result: An extraordinary life lived in ordinary days.

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

A whipping tongue scathingly lashes a false sense of power failing to reflect that a tongue portrays the character of its possessor!

Before her was a man who wasted words on no one. If he said something, you could take the worth of his words to the bank. In her home was a man who had the skill and talent to be anyone and chose to be the best version of himself.

Beauty is everywhere you look, but you have to look.

Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which “collapses” the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes a definite reality.

Beyond the visible is invisible.

Chaos is not the lack of order, it is merely the absence of order, that the observer is used to.

Cause and effect is the basis of my education, leading me to an essence far more profound than any rule of societal conditioning.

Chaos is peaceful when you stand quietly & watch - we are eternal observers, reflecting both tiny & vast, singing infinitely within.

Children observe everything in nature.

Creative people come often at a stark difference between the kind and the mean spirited. Be they an artist or not in life their personal ingenuity is often a marvel to behold. They create opportunities where none were just seconds prior in existence. Creative souls without flexibility are an easy hallmark for a tyrant in behavior. The opposite is also true those creative types open to flexibility are usually more often than not easy going in demeanor. When such subcategories of personalities are highly intuitive they also shift their behavior to match the presence of their peers. Very much like an empathic chameleon able to change its colors so as to fit in out of habit or necessity.

Christmas comes but once a year, starts in August ends in July

[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [...] that everyone did it.

[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.

Dean Walker, my brother. The man that's well on his way to earning the proud title of town drunk.

Don't look so far, when it is so near.

Discovery originates out of unusual observations that curiosity demands to understand.

Don’t you feel you get value for your day if you’ve actually watched the sun rise?

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?" I said nothing. "What colour's a blackbird?" she said. "Black" "Typical!

Do you think they came today?' he said. 'I do. There’s mud on the floor, cigarettes and whisky on the table, fish on a plate for you and a memory of them in my mind. Hardly conclusive evidence I know, but then all evidence is circumstantial.

But more usually I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity. We are not especially interesting, by and large--waiting for a bus, walking along the street; younger people are busy sizing up one another, in the way that children in a park will only register other children. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed, which I rather like; it leaves me free to do what a novelist does anyway, listen and watch, but with the added spice of feeling a little as though I am some observant time-traveller, on the edge of things, bearing witness to the customs of another age.

Education being a change of behavior as a result of experience brings about wisdom and knowledge. While knowledge comes from what we read or study, wisdom comes from what we observe and experience. The purpose of education is not to affect negatively but to positively affect. When I see people using whatever wisdom or knowledge they have to cheat, I see an abuse of education all borne out of ignorance.

Enchantment lies in everyday moments if you are observant.

Everyone pushes and is angry at the people who push them.

Every traveler has their unique observation of the place they have been.

Every traveler should make their own observation.

First impressions tend to be the most clear.

For all his secrecy and fear of being seen, he was touched that we had observed him so closely, and with such love. He loved that we knew him. This is one reason people need to believe in God -- because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.

For you to be effective in your promised land, you must study the land

Funny how nobody talks on the tubes, isn't it? I rarely catch the tube myself, or lifts. Confined spaces, everybody shuts down. Why is that? Perhaps we think everybody on the tube is a potential psychopath or a drunk,so we close down and pretend to read a book or something.

God’s vision must become our vision

Having always observed that most of them who constantly took in the weekly Bills of Mortality made little other use of them than to look at the foot how the burials increased or decreased, and among the Casualties what had happened, rare and extraordinary, in the week current; so as they might take the same as a Text to talk upon in the next company, and withal in the Plague-time, how the Sickness increased or decreased, that the Rich might judge of the necessity of their removal, and Trades-men might conjecture what doings they were likely to have in their respective dealings.

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

Every eye makes its own perception.

Every new day, we must refocus, to see the beauty of the moment

Falling into true love, is not taking a rope to climb out

He seemed like the type that kept people at arm's length, maybe out of arrogance or maybe from personal choice- either way, I wanted to know him so that those eyes were narrowed and focused solely on me.

Horses don't speak, but they communicate through body language. If you look very closely, you'll find out your horse has been trying to talk to you every day.

I assume a constant state of genuflection, retrieving pills, pens, coins: they flee my grasp like Mexican jumping beans. Please do not ask me to carry the groceries, hang pictures, dust the mantle. I succumb to indexterity.

If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation. Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system.

I find this most useful. It justifies the expert time spent upon it. We now have a number of so-called facts each preceded by the word 'probably'. It shows commendable caution on the part of those who don't want to accept responsibility for their own statements." "An intelligent guess is better than no guess at all, Your Excellency," suggested Shelton, who by now had worked off his ire on the unfortunate Trooper Casartelli. "It isn't even an intelligent guess," denied the Ambassador. "It is based solely on what can be seen. No account has been taken of what cannot be seen." "I don't know how it is possible to do that," said Shelton, failing to understand what the other was getting at. "I neither ask nor expect the impossible," the Ambassador gave back. "My point is that data based exclusively on the visible may be made completely worthless by the invisible." He tapped the report with an authoritative forefinger. "They estimate sixteen thousand strongholds -- above ground. How many are below ground?" "Subterranean ones?" exclaimed Shelton, startled. "Of course. There may be fifty thousand of those for all we know." "We didn't see any." "He says we didn't see any," the Ambassador said to Grayder.

If, years later, I do use the slit detector to observe which way the electron went, it will mean that many years earlier the electron must have passed through one slit or the other. But if I don't use the "slit detector," then the electron must have passed through both slits. This is, of course, extremely weird. My actions at the beginning of the twenty-first century can change what happened thousands of years ago when the electron began its journey. It seems that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, and my acts of observation in the present can decide what happened in the past. As much as it challenges any hope of ever really knowing the future, quantum physics asks whether I can ever really know the past. It seems that the past is also in a superposition of possibilities that crystallize only once they are observed.

If you observe nature daily, it brings harmony with you and God.

If you really observe “suburbia,” it was created from fear or for lack of a better word, the conservative mindset terrified of anything original. Especially terrified of the individual. Thousands of years ago they called it Babylon.

If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.

If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments -

I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.