Quotation Matches:
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A Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life. 1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. 3. Never spend your money before you have it. 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold. 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. 8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened. 9. Take things always by their smooth handle. 10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.
 -Thomas Jefferson
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In my many years as a Representative in Congress it is my observation that the district that is best represented is the district that is wise enough to select a man of energy, intelligence, and integrity and reelects him year after year. A man of this type and character serves more efficiently and effectively the longer he is returned by his people.
-Sam Rayburn
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To admit then a right in the House of Representatives to demand, and to have as a matter of course, all the Papers respecting a negotiation with a foreign power, would be to establish a dangerous precedent. It does not occur that the inspection of the papers asked for, can be relative to any purpose under the cognizance of the House of Representatives, except that of an impeachment, which the resolution has not expressed. I repeat, that I have no disposition to withhold any information which the duty of my station will permit, or the public good shall require to be disclosed: and in fact, all the Papers affecting the negotiation with Great Britain were laid before the Senate, when the Treaty itself was communicated for their consideration and advice. The course which the debate has taken, on the resolution of the House, leads to some observations on the mode of making treaties under the Constitution of the United States.
-George Washington
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Actors, Acting
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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
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Adventure
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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
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Age
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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
-Edward T. Hall
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Artist, The
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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
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Authors & Writing
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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
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Belief
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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
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I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing -- it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.
-Mary Wortley Montagu
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Birds
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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
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Bravery
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We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
-William Hazlitt
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Business
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The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.
-Harold Hook
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Censorship
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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
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Conservation
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It's a morbid observation, but if every one on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem.
-Jerry Adler
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Conversation
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The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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Cynicism
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The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Expectation
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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
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Facts
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General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
-William Hazlitt
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Family
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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
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Generosity
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Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation-to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.
-Jon Kabat Zinn
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Genius
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Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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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
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History
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It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.
-Francis Bacon
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Ideas
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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
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Identity
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Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.
-George Gurdjieff
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Individuality
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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
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Intelligence
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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
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Intuition
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Practical observation commonly consists of collecting a few facts and loading them with guesses.
-Source Unknown
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Judging, Judgment
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Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
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Knowledge
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There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
-Denis Diderot
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Language
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To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.
-Victor Hugo
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Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.
-Richard D. Rosen
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Law
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Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.
-Harriet Martineau
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Learning
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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
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Marriage
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Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.
-Ellen Key
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Men & Women
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The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.
-Margaret Oliphant
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Morals
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Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Observation
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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
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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
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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
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In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
-Louis Pasteur, lecture
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Passion
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Passion makes the best observations and the sorriest conclusions.
-Jean Paul
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Perception
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Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
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Planning
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I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
-Edmund Burke
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Pleasure
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The truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and, out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it.
-Samuel Pepys
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Poetry
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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
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Politics
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In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.
-Jonathan Swift
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Power
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Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Professionalism
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It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Quotations
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The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.
-John Morley
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Scholars, Scholarship
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The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world's eye.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science
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Since we are assured that the all-wise Creator has observed the most exact proportions of number, weight and measure in the make of all things, the most likely way therefore to get any insight into the nature of those parts of the Creation which come within our observation must in all reason be to number, weigh and measure.
-Stephen Hales
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Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
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Shyness
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How very seldom do you encounter in the world a man of great abilities, acquirements, experience, who will unmask his mind, unbutton his brains, and pour forth in careless and picturesque phrase all the results of his studies and observation; his knowledge of men, books, and nature. On the contrary, if a man has by any chance an original idea, he hoards it as if it were old gold; and rather avoids the subject with which he is most conversant, from fear that you may appropriate his best thoughts.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Sympathy
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The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
-Nicholson Baker
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Talent
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The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Teamwork
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One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.
-Sir Walter Scott
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Time
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It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
-Henry Ford
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Truth
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A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.
-Alexis Carrel
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Wisdom
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Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
-Samuel Smiles
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Women
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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
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Words
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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
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World
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That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.
-Samuel Johnson
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