#observation

We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order. ↗

— Asa Gray

#beliefs #books #considerations #different #down

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing. ↗

— Michael Connelly

#almost #angeles #back #between #close

The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I'm wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets. ↗

— Ray Dalio

#bet #bets #daily #diversified #helps

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy. ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#activity #asking #brain #degrees #electrical

Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#dare #hope #imagine #observations #politics

No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#appearance #beauty #her #individualize #makes

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite. ↗

— Richard Holmes

#inspirational #observation #reading #science #sublime

Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us. ↗

— Francis Wright

#arrive #attentive #authorities #dictum #examine

I was beginning to think that Simon just had a bad case of OCD, ADD, and PMS. With a little BS and OMG mixed in. ↗

— Dannika Dark

#bs #character #comical #dannika-dark #funny

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic. ↗

— John Stilgoe

#attention #focus #inspiration #magic #observation