Observer Quotes

A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity. (Alexander Pope)
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. View quote
Wallace Stevens
A husband without faults is a dangerous observer. View quote
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. View quote
Bertrand Russell
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. View quote
Sigmund Freud
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer. View quote
Martin Buber
I am a committed observer. I like staying in the background and seeing what's going on. View quote
Valerie Trierweiler
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize. View quote
Christopher Lasch
The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon. View quote
Maria Montessori
The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. View quote
Antoni Tàpies
The material presence of the work only serves as a conveyer launching an invitation to the observer to take part of the comprehensive game of the thousand and one emotions and visions. View quote
Antoni Tàpies
Is it possible to observe without the observer? View quote
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The moment I am aware that I am aware, I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not. View quote
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. View quote
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships. View quote
Hans Hofmann
At times, he even admitted that he'd been more an observer of the world than a participant in it... View quote
Nicholas Sparks
You are not an observer, you are a participant. View quote
Nhat Hanh
Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change and difference is a relationship. View quote
Gregory Bateson
Some authors state that the last stage in this chain of measurements involves "consciousness," or the "intellectual inner life" of the observer, by virtue of the "principle of psycho-physical parallelism." Other authors introduce a wave function for the entire universe. In this book, I shall refrain from using concepts that I do not understand. (Asher Peres)
A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous. View quote
Henry Fielding
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things-it fits. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
On the most usual assumption, the universe is homogeneous on the large scale, i. e. down to regions containing each an appreciable number of nebulae. The homogeneity assumption may then be put in the form: An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time. View quote
Hermann Bondi
Which came first - the observer or the particle? View quote
Vanna Bonta