critical observation Quotes

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

There's a fine line between cultural criticism and bitterness.

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.

You're looking at each and every potential corner for an air bubble to escape. Absolutely! You're on the best of your game.

Many people believe everything others say, even though what they see with their own eyes, should be enough to tell them otherwise.

I don't view myself as a particularly intelligent people, but I do have one ability that I've demonstrated over and over again, that's helped me see things that other people for whatever reason have not seen. That's that most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. I guess it could be stated that most people only hear the music, not the lyrics of human events.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.

You need to be hyper-aware because it's your survival at stake.

We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.

The best is to go into a train station that I've built and buy a ticket. The guy in the ticket booth might recognize me, which is a marvelous feeling, but it might be that he doesn't and I go in like any other passenger, except that I enter with a critical eye, looking to see how it's held up.

The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.

An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention.

A husband without faults is a dangerous observer.

I'm just shocked at how blatantly shallow people are sometimes.

I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.

We must see with our own eyes and not accept any laid-down tradition as if it had some magical power in it.

Whenever we meet anyone, our first, almost unconscious reaction may be to look for imperfections.

When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.

None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.

If you really want to know what's happening here and now, you've got to use your own eyes and your own judgment.

It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.

Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.