Observers Quotes - Page 19

• Careful observers may foretell the hour
  (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r.
  While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er
  Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

  Jonathan Swift

  Rain, Cat, Giving

  Jonathan Swift (1984). “Jonathan Swift”, Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press

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• The dullest observer must be sensible of the order and serenity prevalent in those households where the occasional exercise of a beautiful form of worship in the morning gives, as it were, the keynote to every temper for the day, and attunes every spirit to harmony.

  Washington Irving

  Beautiful, Morning, Exercise

  Washington Irving (2015). “The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Plays, Historical Works, Poetry and Autobiographical Writings (Illustrated): The Entire Opus of the Prolific American Writer, Biographer and Historian, Including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Bracebridge Hall and many more”, p.201, e-artnow

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• History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

  Albert Camus

  Eye, History, Finals

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.289, Vintage

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• The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.

  John Dos Passos

  Effort, Political, Competition

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• The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Science, Two, History

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• Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

  Novalis

  Clever, Opponents, Way

  "Pollen and Fragments". Book by Novalis. Fragment No. 105, 1798.

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• In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.

  Roger Scruton

  Party, Views, Imagination

  Roger Scruton (2015). “Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation”, p.139, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I think anyone who has had a fight and who's a very good observer of the situation and people's behavior is capable of writing a fight. But you do start thinking about writing during the fights that you have with your partner.

  Julie Delpy

  Writing, Fighting, Thinking

  "The Before Midnight Team: Reunion of the Year 2013". Interview with Lauren Bans, www.gq.com. December 5, 2013.

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• With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Destiny, Men, Interesting

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.207, Penguin

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• It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Intelligent, Competition

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1209, Delphi Classics

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• The humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Character, Gambling, Gold

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.413, Simon and Schuster

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• When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Discovery, Years, Law

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• You should not only have attention to everything, but a quickness of attention, so as to observe at once all the people in the room--their motions, their looks and their words--and yet without staring at them and seeming to be an observer.

  Lord Chesterfield

  People, Rooms, Looks

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.20, Oxford University Press

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• As God's children, we are not to be observers; we're to participate actively in the Lord's work. Spectators sit and watch, but we are called to use our spiritual gifts and serve continually.

  Charles Stanley

  Spiritual, Children, Watches

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• There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. They are films with a profound reluctance to get over themselves. They look up at the sceptical observer with the saucer-eyed saintliness of a baby seal in culling season, or a charity mugger smilingly wishing a nice day on the retreating back of a passer-by. One such is Babel.

  Peter Bradshaw

  Baby, Nice, Moving

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• Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level.

  Jane Yolen

  Needs, Levels, Get Up

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• The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the observer.

  Paul Davies

  Reality, Energy, Patterns

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• Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

  David Hockney

  Photography, Real, Depiction

  Lawrence Weschler, David Hockney, Getty Foundation (2008). “True to life: twenty-five years of conversations with David Hockney”, Univ of California Pr

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• One is happy to report that Israel Shenker is still at the aerosol stage. His energy is still compressed. The result distinguishes him both as a Jew and as an observer of Jews.

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  Israel, Energy, Results

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• I am a player in life, not an observer. I look at herpes the way you look at a scraped knee.

  Doug Stanhope

  Life, Player, Looks

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• It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation.

  Brassai

  Photographer, Insight, Vocation

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• Photographs are detonators. They explode in us. We are the gaze as well as the gazed-at. The observer and the observed.

  Edmundo Desnoes

  Photograph, Wells

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• I am not much interested in discovering new territories to photograph. Instead, what I wish my pictures could do is lessen the distance one often feels when looking at landscape photographs... The longer I work, the more important it is to me to make photographs that tell my story as a participant, and not just an observer of the land.

  Mark Klett

  Distance, Land, Wish

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• It is rare to find a man who believes in his own thoughts or speaks that which he is created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own...feel yourself, and be not daunted by things...The light by which we see this world comes out from the soul of the observer.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Men, Light

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• There was this interesting quote: try and live your life without fear and desire. It's this concept that's like when you look at a painting in a museum and you are held in aesthetic arrest. So the I, the ego, is stripped, is gone. The observer and thing become one. That's where fear and desire come in because you don't want to own it, possess it, desire it, and it's not moving you to fear. It's like you're in this harmonious state with the object.

  Zack Snyder

  Moving, Museums, Interesting

  Source: therumpus.net

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