Observational Quotes & Sayings

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology. — Sean M. Carroll

Whatever story you're telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, and then everything burst into flames. — Brian P. Cleary

Whether or not the historical Buddha actually suffered from the kind of primitive agonies Winnicott expounded upon, the meditations he taught in the aftermath of his awakening "hold" the mind just as Winnicott described a mother "holding" an infant. In making the observational posture of mindfulness central to his technique, the Buddha established another version of "an auxiliary ego-function" in the psyches of his followers, one that enabled them, to go back to his metaphor of pulling out an arrow, to tend to their own wounds with both their minds and their hearts. Far from eliminating the ego, as I naively believed I should when I first began to practice meditation, the Buddha encouraged a strengthening of the ego so that it could learn to hold primitive agonies without collapse. — Mark Epstein

As music becomes less of a thing
a cylinder, a cassette, a disc
and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again. — David Byrne

She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food. — Martin Amis

[The] first postulate of the Principle of Uniformity, namely, that the laws of nature are invariant with time, is not peculiar to that principle or to geology, but is a common denominator of all science. In fact, instead of being an assumption or an ad hoc hypothesis, it is simply a succinct summation of the totality of all experimental and observational evidence. — M. King Hubbert

Life goes by on side of bus. — Susannah J. Bell

Maude meant nothing that she said. She knew how pretty she looked in furs. She was a rattle, not understanding her own bnoise; but the scholar hung upon her words, and believed them inspired, and did not know they were murmurings from a shell. — Ernest G. Henham

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. — Fritjof Capra

It's not technically gossip if you start your sentence with "I'm really concerned about ," (fill in the name of the person you're not gossiping about). — Brian P. Cleary

Tenacity, in some an admirable quality, is no substitute for the ability to change, for what in one age might be considered tenacious in another would most certainly be called cowardly. — Michael Blumlein

Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that. — Jeremiah P. Ostriker

My standup is observational, but it's self-observational, and it's self-deprecating, definitely. — Chelsea Handler

A lot of times, I'm singing things that are observational and am definitely including myself. — Kacey Musgraves

Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal. — Dean Koontz

Whenever an observation is made that rules out some possible worlds, we remove the sand from the corresponding areas of the paper and redistribute it evenly over the areas that remain in play. Thus, the total amount of sand on the sheet never changes, it just gets concentrated into fewer areas as observational evidence accumulates. This is a picture of learning in its purest form. (To — Nick Bostrom

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like? — Italo Calvino

The lack of definitive answers to questions discussed in this book also
reflects the fact that science is an ongoing process in wh ich the most important sign of progress is often that results of an experiment or observational study lead to a new set of questions. This is part of what makes science exciting and rewarding for scient ists, but it entails an important dilemma: how do we make the best pract ical and even ethical decisions based on incomplete scient ific knowledge? — Stephen H. Jenkins

I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists. — Dahlia Lithwick

The scientists Heartland works with demanded we host a ninth conference this year to foster a much-needed frank, honest, and open discussion of the current state of climate science and we just couldn't refuse. The public, the press, and the scientific community will all benefit from learning about the latest research and observational data that indicate climate science is anything but 'settled. — Joseph L. Bast

Truth in science is always determined from observational facts. — David Douglass

It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory. — Arthur Eddington

All scientific work is incomplete - whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, to postpone action that it appears to demand at a given time. Who knows, asks Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8:30 next day. — Austin Bradford Hill

The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down. — John Steinbeck

Maybe the secret to continued success is as simple as knowing that your past successes could be done so much better now. — Bill Loguidice

Everyone has their personal topics. My comedy has always been very strong on observational humor, it stems from what I see every day in my life. — Iliza Shlesinger

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. — Clement Greenberg

Strange, awkwardly written, and even shocking, it broke new ground in more than geographical and observational terms. — Linda Colley

...and I was reminded....of the everday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up,for something that does not happen. — Charles McCarry

After the comedy boom of the '80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented. — Scott Aukerman

The majority of individuals view their surroundings with a minimal amount of observational effort. They are unaware of the rich tapestry of details that surrounds them, such as the subtle movement of a person's hand or foot that might betray his thoughts or intentions. — Joe Navarro

Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and all the matter we know today. I know that sounds crazy, but there's strong observational evidence to support the Big Bang theory. And it includes the amount of helium in the cosmos and the glow of radio waves left over from the explosion. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Lettie sighed - wisdom seems to be highly correlated with sighing. — Laura May

I like to describe my stuff as observational comedy. — Lilly Singh

Tuesdays are the worst. They are the spoiled leftovers of Mondays, repackaged with a new expiry date. — Sorin Suciu

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. — James Baldwin

Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. — Neal Stephenson

On the observational side, by far the most important development has been the measurement of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation by COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite) — Stephen Hawking

He cleared his throat, very carefully, to bring the stillness to a more bearable level without breaking the unwritten rule that governs both churches and freshly fallen blankets of snow. — Anna Mattaar

Every comedian works differently. Some comedians might do just observational stuff and they don't do anything personal, and other people.. everything they do is personal and they don't do any observational stuff at all. There's no right or wrong, it's just that everybody picks their own approach. — Brian Regan

Observational studies show that exercise, nutritional supplements and reducing psychological stress can help. Chronic high stress and smoking can lead to accelerated telomere shortening. — Elizabeth Blackburn

Vegard and Riston's job today was to guard and protect me. And considering that I was in a tower room in the Guardians' citadel, it looked like a pretty plum assignment. I mean, how much trouble could a girl get into under heavy guard in a tower room? Notice I didn't ask that question out loud. No need to rub Fate's nose in something when I'd been tempting her enough lately.
Phaelan had generously his guard services as well, just in case something happened to me that my Guardian bodyguards couldn't handle. Phaelan's guard-on-duty stance resembled his pirate-on-shore-leave stane of leaning back in a chair with his feet up, but instead of a tavern table, his boots were doing a fine job of holding down the windowsill. I don't know how I'd ever felt safe without him. — Lisa Shearin

From long experience in places like Afghanisatan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognised, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr's heavens. — Neal Stephenson

I wonder if more students would do better in elementary and high school if teachers taught more about individual exploration of subjects and less about sliding smoothly along observational ruts. Exploration is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun. — John R. Stilgoe

It's not what you're not sure of that gets you: It's when you just know it's okay, and you don't check. — S.J. Lewis

Mother Nature is a peculiar entity. On the one hand, she gives us everything that we need to live. On the other hand, she keeps trying to kill us. — S.J. Lewis

The only ironic thing about that song is that it's called 'Ironic' and it is written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. That's quite ironic when you think about it.

(on Alanis Morissette's 'Ironic') — Ed Byrne

Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king. — Edmund Morris

I'm a lot more observational than personal in my writing. My writing is mostly a lot of questions without answers. — Laura Marling

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows. — Nuala O'Faolain

Benjamin Stallworth understood his shortcomings and was rendered unhappy by that understanding. He was upright enough to wish for correction but too weak to enforce it upon himself. — Michael McDowell

I observe everything around me and when something hits me and it's funny, that's what I talk about. I'm a more observational kind of comic. — Godfrey

The apparent size and age of the universe suggests that many technologically advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it." Or "Where is everybody?" The Fermi Paradox Enrico Fermi, Los Alamos, 1950 — Ralph Kern

Echoes of memorable emotions smiled at Tess reminding her of passed photos of scribbled pictures of drawn conclusions that had now
been unmasked to reveal the clear unconcluded overall view of a present tense scene that caused a stirring of wonderful contemplation on possible compatibilities that she wondered if could form into something more than mere sideline statistics from observational metaphors. — Calvin W. Allison

It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age. — Carl Sagan

There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies. — Joe Hill

Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory. — Arthur Eddington

It's just agony then. Not death — Michael Blumlein

We can understand this conclusion to be the necessary result of a heterosexualized and masculine observational point of view that takes lesbian sexuality to be a refusal of sexuality per se only because sexuality is presumed to be heterosexual, and the observer, here constructed as the heterosexual male, is clearly being refused. — Judith Butler

It is my conviction that if any professional biologist will take adequate time to examine carefully the assumptions upon which the macro-evolution doctrine rests, and the observational and laboratory evidence that bears on the problem of origins, he/she will conclude that there are substantial reasons for doubting the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, I believe that a scientifically sound creationist view of origins is not only possible, but it is to be preferred over the evolutionary one. — Dean H. Kenyon

Goodbye grabbing the mobile every time I think about sharing something moderately observational about something I'm watching on TV with people I have and will never meet. Hello to a world where you can just do stuff, without talking about the stuff you're doing, or talking about talking about the stuff you're doing (except for this, of course, but this doesn't count). — Steven Baxter

The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page. — Kunal Nayyar

I go to a lot of stand-up comedy. I find more inspiration from observational stuff than from rap. — Riz Ahmed

Now let me step back from the problem and very generally discuss natural selection and what we know about it. I think it is safe to say that we know for sure that natural selection, as a process, does work. There is a mountain of experimental and observational evidence, much of it predating genetics, which shows that natural selection as a biological process works. — David M. Raup

There are strong reasons for believing that space goes on beyond the limits of our observational horizon. There are strong reasons because if you look in opposite directions, conditions are the same to within one part in 100,000. So if we are part of some finite structure then, if the gradient is so shallow, it is likely to go on much further. — Martin Rees

The discordant principals' duet is like the nocturnal emission of a cancerous horse tethered in its dolorous slumber to a barbed aluminum fence during an electrical storm. — Sophie McManus

There's no such thing as free kittens. — Brian P. Cleary

Although it is hard to visualize a landscape in a space of high dimensions, the more the number of parameters, the more likely it is that a walk of any finite distance, taken in a random direction from a place near the summit of a mountain, will go down rather than up. Thus, we may conclude that, if the hypotheses made here are true, most changes in the parameters of the laws of physics will decrease the rate at which black holes are produced in our universe. Because of this, the theory I am sketching here is actually subject to observational test. — Lee Smolin

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more? — Chris Rock

If a couple has their picture taken at a wedding or other social gathering, and the woman looks hot, her guy could be blinking, chewing, or even mid-sneeze, and she'll still display it on her desk at work. — Brian P. Cleary

I'm an eccentric, silly, observational guy, but I'm not gonna frighten off social conservatives. — Jim Gaffigan

[H]istorical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either). — Stephen Jay Gould

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. — Christopher Isherwood

No observational problem will not be solved by more data. — Vera Rubin

I have taken the opportunity to update the book and include new theoretical and observational results obtained since the book was first published (on April Fools' Day, 1988). — Stephen Hawking

If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. — Stephen Hawking

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 Grahame-Smith

I never wanted to do observational humor because I never wanted to tell people what they were seeing. — Richard Lewis

By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus. — John D. MacDonald

Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it. — Paul Feyerabend

As an author I'm in my head all day and I worry that I lose touch with reality. But then my dog pees on my shoe and I know I've found it again. — Michelle M. Pillow

I decided that, as a stand-up, I'd position myself as a cerebral, observational comic, making references to Camus and Kierkegaard. I wasn't so much concerned with getting laughs as I was with seeing audience members turn to each other at any given moment and say, "Exactly! — Martin Short

Auden? Does he rhyme? I only like poetry that rhymes. All
the best poets write in rhyme."
"Really?"
"Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare. You can't do better than that. — Shiela Jane

When we developed the 'Seinfeld' show, we took a bet on Jerry Seinfeld, who was not a household name. But Jerry had a voice. He was appearing on 'Late Night', on 'The Tonight Show', had some commercials out there, his voice of observational comedy, looking at the world around him, that voice was really starting to come into its own. — Warren Littlefield

When you look back at the older cartoons, they're very much more observational cartoons. And the cartoon - the people in the cartoons are not making the joke. — Robert Mankoff

Time is but an extension of the Human desire for organization. — Richard L. Foland Jr.

Don't know if it's good or bad that a Google search on "Big Bang Theory" lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them. — John Steinbeck

Not only is love blind, it's a little hard of hearing. — Brian P. Cleary

Observation:

Thanks to technological advances, avid readers seem to be replacing DTBAD (Dead Tree Book Acquisition Disorder) with an alphabet soup of more more modern-day hoarding behaviors: EBAD (E-Book Acquistion Disorder), EGAD (Electronic Gadget Acquisition Disorder), and ABAD (Audiobook Acquisition Disorder). Of course, there's also MYBAD (Movie and YouTube Acquisition Disorder: the hoarding or obsessive viewing of digital films and videos, some based on books). If any of these syndromes describes you, take heart: there's probably an app for that! - 8/9/2013 — Lisa Tolliver

When a kid says "smell my hand," it almost never smells like cinnamon. — Brian P. Cleary

Chances are, if we can't laugh at something, we can't think rationally about it. — Clay A. Johnson

After years of study and personal on-site investigation of UFO reports, I am certain that there is more than ample high-quality observational evidence from highly trained and reliable lay witnesses to indicate that there are unidentified machine-like objects under intelligent control operating in our atmosphere. Such evidence in some cases is supported by anomalous physical effects upon the witnesses, electrical devices, and the environment, as well as by instrumentation such as radar and Geiger counters. — Raymond E. Fowler

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats. — Katie Hafner

If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle ... . Whatever our theoretical predilections, they will in the end have to give way to the observational evidence. — George F. R. Ellis

The fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They have not proved their case ... It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested and tested over the centuries. — Richard E. Berendzen

I'm such a product of my media diet ... it's interesting that you say what I do is observational. It's observational as far as it goes - to the extent that I observe media closely. Kriota might have a better sense of this. I don't always have the best sense of how human nature works, but I certainly know how to dismantle representations of characters. — Robert Sikoryak

The generations that were exposed to sitcom have the people actually saying the line, saying the joke, whereas sort of before that, you have much more observational humor. — Robert Mankoff

GIS, in its digital manifestation of geography, goes beyond just the science. It provides us a framework and a process for applying geography. It brings together observational science and measurement and integrates it with modeling and prediction, analysis, and interpretation so that we can understand things. — Jack Dangermond

If you spot anything, or you think of anything I haven't, tell me, won't you?" This was rather thrilling: Robin prided herself on her observational powers; they were one reason she had secretly cherished the childhood ambition that the large man beside her was living. — Robert Galbraith