#observation

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length. ↗

— Christian Nestell Bovee

#length #makes #observations #out #talent

Must the interest of life wane for us all as the progress of knowledge curtails the playground of imagination? No doubt it must in some measure, but there is another cause. I believe that in these days we have too many occupations, too many interests; we know too many things, and, if you will, have too many advantages and facilities. Our faculty of taking an interest is dissipated and frittered away. ↗

— Eha

#natural-history #observation #imagination

Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise. ↗

— Henry Miller

#love

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead; ↗

— Ethan Canin

#elections

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

Chances are, if we can't laugh at something, we can't think rationally about it. ↗

— Clay A. Johnson

#observational #diet

The Dark Ages are alive and secretly thriving like a herpes infection among us. ↗

— Juliette Fay

#observations-on-life #unexpected-humor #unexpected-life #wry #age

However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will? ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#description #emotion #observation #passion #people

But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation. ↗

— Jeff Lindsay

#stupid #dreams