It's a great mistake I think to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.
Our observation of nature must be diligent our reflection profound and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined and for this reason creative geniuses are not common.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
The result was that if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme.
There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both this is an observation of the Middle Way.
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.
My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership.
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.
Even scientific knowledge if there is anything to it is not a random observation of random objects for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with say my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world as there is of the outer world.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature reflection and experimentation. Observation collects facts reflection combines them experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
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.
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.
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.
Do you want me to apologize after every joke? If it doesn't offend somebody it's probably not a joke. It's probably an observation that's not funny. It's gotta offend somebody somewhere.
Sometimes comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them because I get the joke right but I can't get the character right and it just goes down like a lead balloon.