#observation

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#appreciated #battle #described #easily #great

Ich weiß nicht, aber mich dünkt, ich sähe zwei Wege um zur Wissenschaft der menschlichen Geschichte zu gelangen. Der eine, mühsam und unabsehlich, mit unzähligen Krümmungen, der Weg der Erfahrung; der andere, fast ein Sprung nur, der Weg der innern Betrachtung. Der Wanderer des ersten muß eins aus dem andern in einer langwierigen Rechnung finden, wenn der andere die Natur jeder Begebenheit und jeder Sache gleich unmittelbar anschaut, und sie in ihrem lebendigen, mannigfaltigen Zusammenhange betrachten, und leicht mit allen übrigen, wie Figuren auf einer Tafel, vergleichen kann. ↗

— Novalis

#history #life #observation #science #experience

We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention. ↗

— Francis Wright

#bounds #contention #error #ever #facts

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake. ↗

— Peter Wright

#drawing #i #i think #meditation #most

Every discovery in science and art, is due to the trained power of seeing things ... Keep your eyes open, your ears open ... Trace difficulties. ↗

— Orison Swett Marden

#life #motivation #observation #science #art

It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there. ↗

— Helen Bevington

#beauty #clarity #nature #observation #poetry

I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe. ↗

— Irwin Shaw

#flowers #god #men #movies #observation

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

#bodies #cloudy #dead #distance #endeavor

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity. ↗

— Kenzaburo Oe

#ambiguity #between #country #hundred #japan

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#city #crowds #looking #observation #people-watching