Best 292 quotes in «observation quotes» category

Sometimes all the philosophies that you have read, including that of mine, will not come to any use, what will though, is your own observation.

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.

That a free, or at least an unsaturated acid usually exists in the stomachs of animals, and is in some manner connected with the important process of digestion, seems to have been the general opinion of physiologists till the time of Spallanzani. This illustrious philosopher concluded, from his numerous experiments, that the gastric fluids, when in a perfectly natural state, are neither acid nor alkaline. Even Spallanzani, however, admitted that the contents of the stomach are very generally acid; and this accords not only with my own observation, but with that, I believe, of almost every individual who has made any experiments on the subject. ... The object of the present communication is to show, that the acid in question is the muriatic [hydrochloric] acid, and that the salts usually met with in the stomach, are the alkaline muriates.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.

The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.

The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.

Sometimes you go so far in your life, you can’t get back though you know it’s not really your life.

The acts of observing and judging are necessarily solitary acts.

The desire to catch, as Bonnard hoped, the PASSING MOMENT is antithetical to being in the moment. The photographer is an observer to others’ moments. The Picture People have dedicated themselves to this paradox, and consign themselves on either side of the equation.

The English summer is never far away; it's just above the clouds.

The footsteps of Western Civilization are currently hobbled by a serious case of fallen arches.

The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I'm not making any judgement. It's just the sort of thing I can't help but notice.

The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever.

The more one thinks, the less one sees.

The person who can learn by observation can create his own culture.

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.

The Key to happiness happen whenever you start observation yourself without judging others.

The key to wisdom is silent observation and reflection.

The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint.

There are nowadays," he said, "two prevalent phenomena. One is to make words meaningless, the other is a disloyalty to the things you belong to. They both originate with the Nazis and the Communists.

there is very little 'of course' when it comes to custom

There seem to be two main types of people in the world, crosswords and sudokus.

The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

The star rises from the east. Watch out!

The visible emerged from the invisible.

The waves of probabilities collapse into a physical reality through observation by a conscious mind.

There are many, many, many worlds branching out at each moment you become aware of your environment and then make a choice.

There is a coarse and ugly temperament and tenor observable in the common unconscious person.

There is no greater path than the act of listening, because the observer who listens can begin to see themselves as a part of one expression of purpose and beingness.

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.

The wave quality of light is the same as that of the electron. The wave determines the probable location of the photon of light when it is detected. The wave character of light is not vibrating stuff like a wave of water but rather a wavelike function encoding information about where you'll find the photon of light once it is detected. Until it reaches the detector plate, like the electron, it is seemingly passing through both slits simultaneously, making its mind up about its location only once it is observed [...]. It's this act of observation that is such a strange feature of quantum physics. Until I ask the detector to pick up where the electron is, the particle should be thought of as probabilistically distributed over space, with a probability described by a mathematical function that has wavelike characteristics. The effect of the two slits on this mathematical wave function alters it in such a way that the electron is forbidden from being located at some points on the detector plate. But when the particle is observed, the die is cast, probabilities disappear, and the particle must decide on a location.

They ask me, what will change if we change the perspective? I replied, “Everything.

They are afflicted with the misery of being unable to live according to rules. They face endless harassment and vilification. Isolating themselves from others, they create their own private worlds.

Though she appeared confected of sugar and air, there was a bitter black walnut at her core.

Those who are most sincere are also the most morally suspect, as well as being incapable of producing or appreciating wit.

To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?

To observe life as an inevitability and to observe the nuanced stratification of life are two completely different points of view on life.

Try to pause each day and take a walk to view nature.

We are living in the Selfie Society of Me.

Those who believe they know it all should not fret when they ultimately realize they do not, for when there is nothing left to learn what challenges remain.

Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a bluebottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare...

To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically “collapses,” and the electron falls into a definite state—that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence.

We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.

We can all see, but can you observe?

We don't think. We think we think.

We must not only observe but listen to the sound of nature.

What we beileve is what we see.

What we have now, shall never be again. The poets of the past sit in amazement of the wanna-be's of an era long gone.

We do not need to attend classroom training programmes for everything. Observation opens the windows of knowledge around us

We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.