deep observation Quotes

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.

An artist should have more than two eyes.

I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.

Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking

The camera is more than a recorder, it's a microscope. It penetrates, it goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts.

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.

I think that finding a way into somebody's life that's sort of off from a side angle can tell you more about that person than a greatest hits approach.

A day will come when man will discover an alphabet in the eyes of the chalcedonies, in the marking of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.

If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.

You must look into people as well as at them.