An actor rides in a bus or railroad train; he sees a movement and applies it to a new role. The whole garment in which the actor hides himself is made of small externals of observation fitted to his conception of a role.
-Eleanor Robson Belmont, "The Fabric of Memory," part 1 ch. 2, 1957
"The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, It is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for."
-George Mallory
"Age affects how people experience time. The observations on this are well known, so it is only necessary to outline briefly what has been the experience of everyone I have ever talked to or read about: the years go faster as one gets older. At the age of four or six, a year seems interminable; at sixty, the years begin to blend and are frequently hard to separate from each other because they move so fast! There are, of course, a number of common-sense explanations for this sort of thing. If you have only lived five years, a year represents 20 percent of your life; if you have lived fifty years, that same year represents only 2 percent of your life, and since lives are lived as wholes, this logarithmic element would make it difficult to maintain the same perspective on the experience of a year’s passage throughout a lifetime."
-Edward T. Hall, “Experiencing Time,” The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, Doubleday (1983)
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
-William S. Burroughs
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
-William Faulkner
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-Buddha
"Inventive man" has invented nothing -- nothing "from scratch." If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds.
-Dorothy Thompson, "The Courage To Be Happy", 1957
Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
-Samuel Johnson, Rambler #2, March 24, 1750
"I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed."
-Samuel Johnson, Letter to Bennet Langton
"I must acknowledge an interest, or rather a dismay, in discussing this 'family memoir,' for from experience and observation I have come to regard the American Nuclear Family in the last 50 years as the enemy of individual determination, of personal autonomy--in short, as a disease."
-Richard Howard, [in a review of a memoir]
The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
All ideas come from sensation or reflection.--Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.
-John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690
"Individualism, as a definition of holding to personal ideals, is classed as obstinacy and anti-social. Inevitably we run point blank into the evils of compromise. When compromise enters our moral fiber, it spreads like a cancerous growth. We think we plan adequate safeguards around areas in which we contemplate yielding our standards, but once we lower the fence and break our strong will to do right, come what may, we expose ourselves to forces that spread beyond control. Compromise always starts on some rather insignificant principle. The dangers of yielding seem negligible and we usually risk those things first where observation and detection by others is difficult. We thus seek to avoid censure and discipline. In a short time we find ourselves trading our principles for false values and doing it in the black market of human relationships. . . ."
-Ralph W. Hardy
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
http://www.thirteen.org/pressroom/release.php?get=1640
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, essay: "The Crack-Up", February, 1936
There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence to see for themselves.
-Will Rogers
"To linger in the observation of things other than the self implies a profound conviction of their worth."
-Charles-Damian Boulogne, My Friends the Senses
"The observation of others is coloured by our inability to observe ourselves impartially. We can never be impartial about anything until we can be impartial about our own organism."
-A. R. Orage, Essays and Aphorisms
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
-William Osler, Aphorisms from His Bedside Teachings and Writings
"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind."
-Louis Pasteur, lecture
"Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet."
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
-Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes [the narrator], 1911
