Best 292 quotes in «observation quotes» category

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

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

Trust not my reading, nor my observations, Which with experimental seal do warrant The tenor of my book.

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.

We learn by observation, imitation and repetition.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.

What we know is not capable of being otherwise; of things capable of being otherwise we do not know, when they have passed outsideour observation, whether they exist or not. Therefore the object of knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal; for things that are of necessity in the unqualified sense are all eternal; and things that are eternal are ungenerated and imperishable.

We must turn to nature itself, to the observations of the body in health and in disease to learn the truth.

We must look a long time before we can see

When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are seeking to measure.

When general observations are drawn from so many particulars as to become certain and indisputable, these are jewels of knowledge.

Anagrams are everywhere, especially when you’re waiting, ‘toilet’ can give ‘Eliott’ i just found out.

With respect to the present time, there are few persons who unite the qualifications of good observers with a situation favourable for accurate observation.

You have to have some kind of power of observation, almost like a trained observer.

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.

All this seeing. All this relentless taking in.

While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

You have to unzip your heart before you unzip your pants.

a dementia sufferer effuses delight and notices very different things when taken out in her wheelchair. Such people can teach us to see again the little things that make a big difference. They can show us how to enjoy familiar environments with fresh new eyes.

A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation

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

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.

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles. Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring. Their properties and consequences are well established and well understood consequences of quantum mechanics.

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

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]

Beyond the visible is invisible.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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?

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.

Every eye makes its own perception.