Observations Quotes

He made two or three peculiar observations; as when shewn the botanical garden, 'Is not EVERY garden a botanical garden? ~ James Boswell

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion - we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. ~ Daniel Kahneman

The astronomer is, in some measure, independent of his fellow astronomer; he can wait in his observatory till the star he wishes to observe comes to his meridian; but the meteorologist has his observations bounded by a very limited horizon, and can do little without the aid of numerous observers furnishing him contemporaneous observations over a wide-extended area. ~ James Pollard Espy

Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Passion makes the best observations and the sorriest conclusions. ~ Jean Paul

Schizophrenia
its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it
remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"
a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win." It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms ~ Gregory Bateson

It does seem that the sea ice is returning to 'average' after the record lows of 2007 and 2008. There has been a definite recovery trend since then, so far from being a progression towards ice free summers it seems that it was a temporary dip. The recent observations do make the 2007 projections that the region would be ice free by 2013 look very unrealistic. Given what is happening only the foolish would look many years into the future and predict ice free summers now. ~ David Whitehouse

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. ~ J.D. Salinger

The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Why are these historical observations interesting?...they suggest that we should be careful about attributing our distinction between philosophy and science to earlier thinkers…The examples I have given do raise an interesting question: Why is it that we tend to see such a radical break between philosophy and science, and, more important, should we? The question can be raised directly, without the need for history, as Quine has done. But history brings the point home in an especially clear way: It shows us an assumption we take for granted by pointing out that it is not an assumption everyone makes. ~ Daniel Garber

By my observations, I don't think 'love' is an emotion," [Phos] said. "It doesn't make sense to me. ~ Christina Daley

I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip. ~ Charles M. Schulz

I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means "guess." To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is "just a theory" too. ~ Philip Plait

If you are working with a therapist counselor social worker grief expert minister priest or anyone else who is trying to help you navigate the wilderness of grief and they start talking about the groundbreaking observations of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross suggesting there is an orderly predictable unfolding of grief please please please. Do yourself a favor. Leave. People who are dying often experience five stages of grief: denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance. They are grieving their impending death. This is what Elizabeth Kubler Ross observed. People who are learning to live with the death of a beloved have a different process. It isn't the same. It isn't orderly. It isn't predictable. Grief is wild and messy and unpredictable ~ Tom Zuba

And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the anticyclonic. That mutant left-handed runt of the liter... the poor damned giant evil beautiful thing... ~ Bruce Sterling

Observations," he says.
"Four imperial Unseelie guards were the only commonality I was able to isolate endemic to both scenes." They'd been standing, armed, at the dock doors, overseeing the delivery.
He gives me a sidewise look. "Wow. That was, like, a whole sentence. With nouns and verbs and connective tissue. Endemic. Fancy word. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with. ~ Mark Twain

Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option. ~ Timothy McVeigh

observations suggest that the survivor as ANP typically engages in tasks of daily life such as reproduction, attachment, caretaking, and other social action tendencies, and avoidance of traumatic memories, which support a focus on daily life issues. In contrast, the survivor as EP primarily displays evolutionary defensive and emotional reactions to the (perceived) threat on which he or she seems to be fixated. Third, survivors should be very susceptible to classical conditioning, because, as we discuss below, EP and ANP strongly respond to unconditioned and conditioned threat cues. ~ Onno Van Der Hart

The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations ... He does not confuse truth with plausibility ... he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable ... The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy. ~ Denis Diderot

If there is but one pearl of wisdom I have to impart to you, after all my observations here thus far, it is do not take yourself too seriously. Because when you get here, you might just find that you are not exactly who or what you thought you were. ~ Natasha Rendell

From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment.
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which 'verified' the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation--which revealed the class bias of the paper--and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantl ~ Karl Popper

Even science is inductive, relying on observations and best explanations, not always deductive conclusions. ~ Nabeel Qureshi

Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children's rhyme 'Jal pare/pata nare' ('Rain falls / The leaf trembles) n Iswrchandra Vidyasagar's Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore's memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or 'high' Bengali: 'Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe' ('Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth'). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its these and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore's instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. 'Rain falls' and 'the leaf trembles' are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don't necessarily have to follow each other. It's a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it's a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously. ~ Amit Chaudhuri

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

Walking is nonverbal communication. Like I can tell if [she's] mad by her footsteps. Walking isn't as overt as other signals, like the way someone smells, their voice, their laugh, their facial expressions. Steps can be frivolous, but they're often distinct from person to person. Familiarity grows over time, slowly, inadvertently. I never tried to get to know her walk deliberately. This stuff happens unwittingly... Living with someone can't be simulated or rehearsed. It has to be experienced, in real time. There is no substitute for shared involvement, for creating actual memories. Like, I know how [she] blows her nose. I've never thought about it until now, but I do. I know the cadence, the rhythm. She does it in the same tempo every time. These observations - her footsteps, how she blows her nose - they're like little secrets. ~ Iain Reid

There is no such thing as a good war and there is no such thing as a justified war but there is a war of necessity and we have to fight it if we want to assure our way of life even if it's the wrong one. ~ Boris Zubry

That is, a system starts with a group of interrelated propositions which involve reference to empirical observations within the logical framework of the propositions in question. ~ Talcott Parsons

The thesis that the living creatures have always been composed different species was established in a time where no sufficient observations had been made and when science hardly existed. This thesis is denied every day by those who have made accurate observations, who have long time observed nature and who have had the benefit from studying our musei's large and rich collections. ~ Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

The attention of a traveller, should be particularly turned, in the first place, to the various works of Nature, to mark the distinctions of the climates he may explore, and to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur. ~ William Bartram

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking. ~ Helene Deutsch

Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods. ~ Abigail Adams

We refuse unfair offers because people who meekly accepted unfair offers didn't survive in the Stone Age. Observations ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Writing derives from an accumulation of experience. It's as if you collect facts and observations over time, like a stone to stand on. From there, imagination takes over. ~ Harriet Doerr

Data adds concrete information to a teacher's observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding. ~ Jose Ferreira

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

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness ... Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden. ~ Thomas Mann

The observations, so numerous and so important, of the pendulum as object are especially relevant to the length of its oscillations. Those that I propose to make known to the [Paris] Academy [of Sciences] are principally addressed to the direction of the plane of its oscillation, which, moving gradually from east to west, provides evidence to the senses of the diurnal movement of the terrestrial globe. ~ Leon Foucault

When you're given the gift of truth, you spend a lot of time trying to tone it down because it is already offensive enough. ~ Shannon L. Alder

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHECKLIST If we want our kids to have a shot at making it in the world as eighteen-year-olds, without the umbilical cord of the cell phone being their go-to solution in all manner of things, they're going to need a set of basic life skills. Based upon my observations as dean, and the advice of parents and educators around the country, here are some examples of practical things they'll need to know how to do before they go to college - and here are the crutches that are currently hindering them from standing up on their own two feet: 1. An eighteen-year-old must be able to talk to strangers - faculty, deans, advisers, landlords, store clerks, human resource managers, coworkers, bank tellers, health care providers, bus drivers, mechanics - in the real world. ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince's writing style(s) during the course of the album's recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of 'Electric Chair' among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that "he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn't really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious - it's like something you'd do if you had no access to any equipment. He'd use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he'd record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song - and most likely, he'd have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he'd do his one man band approach to recording a song. He'd know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the 'click track' - the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo - he'd then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He'd build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there's your demo. ~ Jake Brown

I am not very skeptical ... a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met not a few men, who ... have often thus been deterred from experiments or observations which would have proven servicable. ~ Charles Darwin

There is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people. ~ James Burgh

I've explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You'd feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible. ~ Scott Adams

Sometimes when I look at them from a distance, I try and squint my eyes and clear my mind. I peer at them the way a stranger would - without any emotions, just observations. In this large fortress I had created around my heart, the one that let me enter situations easily and leave even more easily, how did they find a cat flap that allowed them to crawl into my soul? ~ Twinkle Khanna

Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations. ~ Martin Rees

Candied Sin I can hold you in my arms Feeling your soul's embrace I can make it hard to breath Standing face to face Lips of sweetest candied sin Wisps of thoughts ignite within Makes the hours infinite Observations intricate Touch of skin, heat and lace Skimmed upon a jaded face Into your depths, here I go Swept into my very soul. ~ Alexia Purdy

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations. ~ Isaiah Berlin

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words. ~ Meghan Daum

The antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties of honey were
revealed as a result of clinical observations and research. Honey
is exceedingly effective in painlessly cleaning up infection and
dead cells in these regions and in the development of new tissues.
The use of honey as a medicine is mentioned in the most ancient
writings. In the present day, doctors and scientists are rediscovering
the effectiveness of honey in the treatment of wounds.
Dr. Peter Molan, a leading researcher into honey for the last 20
years and a professor of biochemistry at New Zealand's University
of Waikato, says this about the antimicrobial properties of honey:
"Randomized trials have shown that honey is more effective in
controlling infection in burn wounds than silver sulphadiazine, the
antibacterial ointment most widely used on burns in hospitals. ~ Harun Yahya

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that at times Imaginations are assigned to him which at first he must forego understanding; he must receive them as Imaginations and let them ripen in his soul as such. In spiritual experience, much depends on a man having the patience to make observations, at first to simply accept them, and to wait with understanding them until the right moment arrives. ~ Rudolf Steiner

In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself.
But there is another moment of discovery - its antithesis - that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient's CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Food always sounds optimistic when you have it and pessimistic when you don't. ~ Boris Zubry

Altogether, these observations suggest that several processes contribute to psychotic experience: the loss of familiarity with the world, hypothetically associated with noisy information processing; increased novelty detection mediated by the hippocampus; associated alterations of prefrontal cortical processing, which have reliably been associated with impairments in working memory and other executive functions; increased top-down effects of prior beliefs mediated by the frontal cortex that may reflect compensatory efforts to cope with an increasingly complex and unfamiliar world; and finally disinhibition of subcortical dopaminergic neurotransmission, which increases salience attribution to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, increased noise of chaotic or stress-dependent dopamine firing can reduce the encoding of errors of reward prediction elicited by primary and secondary reinforcers, thus contributing to a subjective focusing of attention on apparently novel and mysterious environmental cues while reducing attention and motivation elicited by common and natural and social stimuli. ~ Andreas Heinz

Life is a constant battle of fighting your own fears and not absorbing others. Don't fill the empty spaces of your heart with the fears of others in your life. It is the highly anxious person that will tell you that certain people and experiences need to be labeled and kept either close or at a distance. They go to great lengths to categorize things, in order to feel balance in their life because they are out of balance. Life to them is about control and making you believe that their perfect world is normal when there is nothing normal about it. Highly anxious people live through manipulating their world into what is easy and palatable to them and they can easily pull you into an unrealistic view of the world around them. You constantly have to reassess what is reasonable and what is over exaggerated because fear drives their every action. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too." ~ Robert Frost

Craziness is only the state of mind. ~ Boris Zubry

This meaning-argument is of a very different kind from the arguments I have been speaking about so far. The premise entails the conclusion all right, but it is so astoundingly false that it defies criticism, at first, by the simple method of taking the reader's breath away. This was a method which the neo-Hegelian idealists later perfected: reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism. Say or imply, for example, that in English "value" means the same as "individuality." You can be miles down the track of your argument before they get their breath back.
This method is not only physiologically but ethologically sound. Of course it should never be used first. You need first to earn the respect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, or the like: then apply the violent solecism. Tell them, for example, that when we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was born out of wedlock. You cannot go wrong this way. Decent philosophers will be so disconcerted by this, that they will never do the one thing they should do: simply say, "That is NOT what 'prime number' means!" Instead, they will always begin … [by] casting about for an excuse for someone's saying what you said, or a half-excuse, or a one-eighth excuse; nor is there any danger that they will search in vain. ~ David Stove

There's people who live life authentically and there's people who live a life of fabrication. And it begins with the question of how you're gonna do your time. And these are observations I made about Folsom when I was there with Dustin Hoffman when he was directing 'Straight Time.' ~ Michael Mann

Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other. ~ Feist

I give the world thoughtful observations and considered theses, and it gives me back a dozen Kardashians. You know what's going to happen to my library when I sell it? Nothing. Flat nothing. It will probably go to some interior designer who will tell her client how authentic it is. But I'll be damned if a single one of the books are cracked open by their video-game-playing fucktard children! ~ Jade Chang

As the result of some observations I have made in recent years, I propose to add two new and previously undescribed varieties to the various forms of insanity with fixed ideas, whose underlying phenomenology is essentially phobic. The two new terms I would like to put forth, following the nomenclature currently accepted by leading clinicians, are dysmorphophobia and taphephobia.

The first condition consists of the sudden appearance and fixation in the consciousness of the idea of one's own deformity; the individual fears that he has become deformed (dysmorphos) or might become deformed, and experiences at this thought a feeling of an inexpressible disaster… The ideas of being ugly are not, in themselves, morbid; in fact, they occur to many people in perfect mental health, awakening however only the emotions normally felt when this possibility is contemplated.

But, when one of these ideas occupies someone's attention repeatedly on the same day, and aggressively and persistently returns to monopolise his attention, refusing to remit by any conscious effort; and when in particular the emotion accompanying it becomes one of fear, distress, anxiety, and anguish, compelling the individual to modify his behaviour and to act in a pre-determined and fixed way, then the psychological phenomena has gone beyond the bounds of normal, and may validly be considered to have entered the realm of psychopathology.

The dysmorphophobic, indeed, is a veritably unh ~ Enrico Agostino Morselli

I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply our notes of our observations. This view has been held, in one form or another, by many philosophers of high reputation from Plato onwards, and I shall use the language which is natural to a man who holds it. ~ G.H. Hardy

In this book, I want to share with you some extraordinary observations that I have made in my 50 years in dentistry. I believe these experiences made me a better dentist and played a significant role in my evolution as a human being. ~ James E. Rota

I see that you have hitherto been one of that herd who, in order to learn how matters such as this take place, and in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not exhaust themselves in waking and studying, and mortify themselves with experiments and observations, but retire into their studies and glance through an index and a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said any thing about them; and, being assured of the true sense of his text, consider that nothing else can be known. ~ Galileo Galilei

In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days was the plain everyday observations that I recorded in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbor... Local gossip. A kind of reporting, a style of 'seeing' and 'hearing' that would later seriously influence me, though I was unaware of it then, for all my 'formal' writing, the stuff that I published and carefully typed, was more or less fictional. ~ Truman Capote

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery. ~ Cynthia Ozick

Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge. ~ Sir Ronald Fisher

I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell. ~ Tom Holland

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time. ~ Aimee Bender

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the 'scientific' theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience - the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man's experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun 'rises' for me today as it 'rose' for the man of ten thousand years ago. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton

Grub and Derek sitting on the veranda of the house in Dar es Salaam. Derek was a nationalized Tanzanian. He knew Swahili as well as he knew English. And he was liked and respected by almost all Tanzanians, including the Kigoma officials and my own field staff. He helped me to build up a new research center, where almost all the observations were made by the Tanzanian field staff. The ~ Jane Goodall

That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting inevitable. ~ Robert Walser

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought. ~ George Eliot

The belief that science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my denial of it is often met with incredulity. I have even been suspected of being insincere- of denying what nobody in his senses would doubt.
But in fact the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory is absurd; as may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as evidence. This story should show us that though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not.
Twenty-five years ago I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions : 'Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!' They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, 'Observe!' is absurd. (It is not even idiomatic, unless the object of the transitive verb can be taken as understood.) Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems. ~ Karl Popper

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think. ~ Isaac Asimov

Now." After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Job Vacancy in America - National Arbiter in Chief of "Who Is Racist" In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Through my own observations. I am convinced that an absolutely honest and direct inquiry into oneself will lead to understanding. ~ Bruce Lee

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose. ~ William Bateson

Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified. ~ Richard Hamming

I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations. ~ Charles Kingsley

Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can't be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties.
Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It's a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change.
Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts.
Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict?
Dan Ronco's Diary, 2016
~ Dan Ronco

In nonviolent communication, no matter what words others may use to express themselves, we simply listen for their observations, feelings, needs, and requests. Then we may wish to reflect back, paraphrasing what we have understood. We stay with empathy, allowing others the opportunity to fully express themselves before we turn our attention to solutions or requests for relief. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

Sure, but don't expect great observations. Mostly I just looked for dirty pictures hidden within the artwork. Did you know Monet put a boob in all his paintings? Apples and Grapes - get it? I mean, come on. The guy was a horn-dog. ~ Penny Reid

My spirits were so glum I almost overlooked the two letters waiting on my writing table.
When I did see them, my heart gave one of those painful thumps, and I wondered if these were letters of rejection. The top one had my name written out in a bold, slanting hand, with flourishing letter-ends and underlining. I pulled it open.

My Dear Meliara:
You cannot deny me the pleasure of your company on a picnic this afternoon. I will arrange everything. All you need to do is appear and grace the day with your beautiful smile. To meet you will be some of our mutual friends…

Named were several people, all of whom I knew, and it ended with a promise of undying admiration. It was signed Russav.
Could it be an elaborate joke, with me as the butt, as a kind of revenge for my social lapse? I reread the note several times, dismissing automatically the caressing tone--I knew it for more of his flirtatious style. Finally I realized that I did not see Tamara's name among the guests, though just about all of the others had been at the party the night before.
A cold sensation washed through me. I had the feeling that if anyone was being made a butt, it was not Meliara Astiar, social lapse notwithstanding.
I turned to the next letter and was glad to see the plain script of my Unknown:

Meliara--
In keeping faith with your stated desire to have the truth of my observations, permit me to observe that you have a remarkable ability to win ~ Sherwood Smith

We doubt that any facts actually exist. We only have observations and interpretations. Most of the interpretations remain questionable. ~ Peter J. Carroll

A moving wall of oxen advanced, and our mighty elephant himself was brought to a standstill. There was nothing to regret in this enforced halt, however, for a most curious spectacle was presented to our observations. A drove of four or five thousand oxen encumbered the road, and, as our guide had supposed, they belonged to a caravan of Brinjarees. "These people," said Banks, "are the Zingaris of Hindostan. They are a people rather than a tribe, and have no fixed abode, dwelling under tents in summer, in huts during the winter or rainy season. They are the porters and carriers of India, and I saw how they worked during the insurrection of 1857. By a sort of tacit agreement between the belligerents, their convoys were permitted to pass through the disturbed provinces. In fact, they kept up the supply of provisions to both armies. If these Brinjarees belong to one part of India more than to another, I should say it was Rajpootana, and perhaps more particularly the kingdom of Milwar. ~ Jules Verne

She's one of those third year girls who gripe my liver ... You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture ... They're officious and dull. They're always making profound observations they've overheard. ~ Gene Kelly

The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I'm wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets. ~ Ray Dalio

The fundamental difficulty in myothermic observations is the smallness of the changes involved and their rapidity. ~ Archibald Hill

As a geologist, I love Earth observations, but it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. ~ Harrison Schmitt

In bed we talked for hours, conversations that spiralled out from observations into grand, abstract theories and back again. (...) I didn't feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say. ~ Sally Rooney

These observations tie in directly with the whole question of organizing. Why do we have leaders? We put some people out in the fields and all of a sudden they hit, they click. Everyone's happy with them and they begin to move mountains. With other people there are problems and heartaches. They just don't go. When we look and see what's happening, almost invariably the differences are along the lines of willingness to sacrifice and work long hours. ~ Cesar Chavez

They scribbled observations in notebooks. ~ Reid Hoffman

Were I disposed to consider the comparative merit of each of them [facts or theories in medical practice], I should derive most of the evils of medicine from supposed facts, and ascribe all the remedies which have been uniformly and extensively useful, to such theories as are true. Facts are combined and rendered useful only by means of theories, and the more disposed men are to reason, the more minute and extensive they become in their observations ~ Benjamin Rush

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. ~ Michael Behe