#observation

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

The lesson of the last year is this: foreign policy can't be managed through the politics of personality, and our President would do well to take note of an observation John F. Kennedy made once he was in office - that all of the world's problems aren't his predecessor's fault. ↗

— Sarah Palin

#foreign #foreign policy #his #john #kennedy

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. ↗

— Walter Pater

#culture #eager #human #human spirit #life

It was this weird confrontation of these two delicious flavors that got me consciously or subconsciously combining Lincoln and vampires as an observational in-joke with myself. ↗

— Seth Graham-Smith

#confrontation #consciously #delicious #flavors #got

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves. ↗

— Will Rogers

#fence #few #kinds #learn #learns

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

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable." [The Eternal Value of Privacy, May 18, 2006] ↗

— Bruce Schneier

#freedom #individuality #liberty #observation #privacy