Quotes about Observation

When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.

The scenery is time bound but the seer is timeless. You are the timeless seer in the midst of time bound scenery.

I'm not looking at anything now. I'll look at it at the time. What I have seen, what I've seen is so bad.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the lower animals (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.

As regards his health--and the rest of the things--the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it. But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass. Notebook When

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so

A visitor to Mark Twain's house in Hartford observed mountains of books stacked on the floor. The author apologized for the disorder. You see, he lamented, It is so very difficult to borrow shelves.