Top 100 I Observe Quotes
#1. I write - and read - for the sake of the story ... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?
Ayn Rand
#2. I used to take on trust a man's deeds after having listened to his words. Now having listened to a man's words I go on to observe his deeds.
Confucius
#3. Look at us. A line of symmetry. Two halves of a whole. Two peas in a pod. A pair of queens. Though your card, I must observe, has aged better than mine, which has been played too often.
Erika Robuck
#4. It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me.
Hermann Hesse
#5. If you want to observe anger in its entirety, you will have to observe it alone, in the privacy of your room. Then alone can you see it in its fullness, for then there are no limitations. This is why I advise the pillow meditation to certain people, so that they can observe their anger fully.
Rajneesh
#6. I'm never bored, never ever bored. If I've got a day off I'll sit in a cafe and watch and observe. I'm a great observer.
David Suchet
#7. I will only observe, that that ethereal sense - sight, and touch, which is at the other extremity of the scale, have from time acquired a very remarkable additional power.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
#8. I don't want to be famous. I like to be able to sit in a cafe and watch the world go by and observe people.
Sophia Myles
#9. I like to go to Starbucks and watch the intellectuals. I observe them and their intellectualness. They in turn observe me drinking coffee and being a creeper.
Ryan Lilly
#10. He regards boredom, I observe, as the One and Mighty Enemy of his soul. And will succeed in conquering it, I am sure - if he survives the experience.
Dorothy Dunnett
#11. I'm interested in how we define things by how we choose to observe them, and how everywhere in our lives, and in every moment we experience, there are forces at work that we don't fully understand. Couple this curiosity with a love of portraiture painting, and that's how this project was born.
Oliver Jeffers
#12. One of the reasons I love acting is because I'm so interested in other people's lives, and I often incorporate things I hear or observe into my work. I've become a bit of a 'person addict,' and so I like brushing up against lots of different characters.
Jason Alexander
#13. You wrong me, Madame Lefoux. I never gossip. I observe. And then relay my observations to practically everyone." The
Gail Carriger
#14. The longer I observe the way people really act, the happier I am that I never pay attention to them. The
George Alec Effinger
#15. Sin in the theater, I can observe now, is comparable to education in a university: it is there for those who wish to take advantage of it, but fewer do than you might suspect.
Billie Burke
#16. I decline the election. It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.
Edmund Burke
#17. In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.
Michel De Montaigne
#18. It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise
Barbara Kingsolver
#19. Live a life of friction. Let yourself be disturbed as much as possible, but observe.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#20. I would make the tea on a Daniel Day-Lewis set just to observe how he crafts roles like he did in 'My Left Foot.' That was the equivalent of seeing Haley's Comet for me. I just couldn't understand how that was possible.
David Oyelowo
#21. I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion - a phenomenon so rare that I would walk any day ten miles to observe it.
Henry David Thoreau
#22. I think people with open minds will observe the way we do things and realize that our goal is to have successful, happy, productive adults, and they will take our ideas and implement them elsewhere for their own children.
Daniel Greenberg
#23. I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#24. Nor do I like being told upsetting news - unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. She had too much of everything, and so she longed to have less; less, she was sure, would bring her happiness. To me it was a laugh and a relief to observe the unhappiness that too much can bring; I had been so used to observing the reults of too little.
Jamaica Kincaid
#26. Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme" - i.e., consistent).
Ayn Rand
#27. pleased to observe, that you submit to reason and necessity without indulging useless complaint. I applaud this conduct exceedingly, the more, perhaps, since it discovers a strength of mind seldom observable in your sex.
Eliza Parsons
#28. I observe there is in Mr. Hooker no affected language; but a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of reason, and that backed with the authority of the Scriptures, the fathers and schoolmen, and with all law both sacred and civil.
Richard Hooker
#29. Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.
Chinua Achebe
#30. I'm not staring. I'm observing ... And what do you observe? ... A brave young woman who has always fought for what was right, even when it was unpopular.
Michelle Moran
#31. Amidst the rush of worldly comings and goings, I observe how all endings become beginnings
Wayne Dyer
#32. Mainly we obsess on fixing or pacifying the mind. I simply ask you to observe it from a place of neutrality.
Mooji
#33. Music has always been a location for me to run to, whether it's through someone else's song or my own. I can observe my own planet from this foreign land and things make sense within the telescopic lens of song.
Jon Foreman
#34. Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.
Whitney Houston
#35. I, George Bush, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain. I call upon all public officials and the people of the United States to observe that decade with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.
George H. W. Bush
#36. When I observe other animals, I understand their behavior. I can't say the same for mankind.
Anthony D. Williams
#37. I observe myself and I come to know others.
Laozi
#38. My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.
Christa McAuliffe
#39. In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.
Jonathan Swift
#41. I know that you observe Christmas Day as you learned it at home. I do not observe it. However, as assistant director of this prison, I allow all the Catholics to observe freely and with some joy this day in this home.
Odilo Globocnik
#42. And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
Jeanette Winterson
#43. I observe life more than I live it.
Jayme K.
#44. Since I have been obliged to associate continually with other people, and observe what they do, and how they employ themselves, I have become far better satisfied with myself.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#45. My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. Although I am not a climatologist, it has been interesting to observe climatology from the point of view of an arctic scientist. In order for the field of climatology and IPCC to be healthy, I want to provide a few criticisms, which I hope are constructive.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu
#47. I used to listen to what others said, and expect them to act accordingly. But nowadays, I listen to what they say, and then observe what they do.
Confucius
#48. I turn my gaze inward. I fix it there and keep it busy. I look inside myself. I continually observe myself.
Michel De Montaigne
#49. I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.
Lou Reed
#50. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.
Sam Harris
#51. When I came to Washington, I was troubled to observe so many similarities between the behaviors of drug-addicted patients and my political colleagues. In Washington power is like morphine.
Tom Coburn
#52. Writing something new is an effective way to get rid of writer's block. Or you can observe the people around you and fantasize like I do.
B.A. Gabrielle
#53. I observe that more evolved souls are now reincarnating as women. Women find it easier to meditate and easier to develop their psychic abilities.
Frederick Lenz
#54. I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.
Giovanni Arduino
#55. Music makes me want to dance but I'm not sure that's something anybody wants to observe.
Gotye
#56. At a priesthood meeting ... the strongest language in regard to Plural Marriage was used that I ever heard, and among other things it was stated that all men in position who would not observe and fulfill that law should be removed from their places.
Abraham H. Cannon
#57. We shouldn't judge people. But there's a difference between judging and observing. And sometimes as we observe, our eyebrows become raised. Observation with an attitude, that's what I like to call it.
C. JoyBell C.
#58. As my ability to observe my desired destiny got sharper and sharper, my cells began to reorganize themselves. I began to signal new genes in new ways, and then my body really started getting better faster. What
Joe Dispenza
#59. Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.
Fanny Kemble
#60. I'm a Christian because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition - that we're not okay.
Rachel Held Evans
#61. I'm not brave. I'm just incredibly observant." Steve has discovered that the more you observe, the more data you collect, the more patterns you see, and the more boldly you can act. As Steve would say, "This is a big idea!"3
Tina Seelig
#62. Now, Betteredge, exert those sharp wits of yours, and observe the conclusion to which the Colonel's instructions point!" I instantly exerted my wits. They were of the slovenly English sort; and they consequently muddled it all
Wilkie Collins
#63. My dad's method in his madness was to try every sport and then observe what I liked. I played football, tennis, golf, cricket but I loved my snooker.
Ronnie O'Sullivan
#64. I like a movie that the audience actively has to participate in, and not just casually observe. Whatever my part in it, just as an audience member, I find that exciting.
Jennifer Jason Leigh
#65. I respect everything in change and the solemn beauty of life and death ... and therefore, while man is amidst the immense beauty of objective bodies, he must possess the capacity of self-perfection and must observe and represent his world with full confidence.
Ansel Adams
#66. Making a movie where the central character is a horse was a challenge. Because I'm scared of riding. I was thrown as a kid. One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don't ride. I observe, and I worry.
Steven Spielberg
#67. Please, enlighten me, Tom. What exactly did you observe?"
"That men fly to you like a bug to a zapper."
"Lovely. That's a lovely analogy. Yes, I'm a man-eater, Tom.
Fisher Amelie
#68. Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble, I should judge, to lie with the schools.
Thomas A. Edison
#69. I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
Thom Gunn
#70. After some time, with my eyes closed, I began to enjoy this wonderful play of colors and forms, which it really was a pleasure to observe. Then I went to sleep and the next day I was fine. I felt quite fresh, like a newborn.
Albert Hofmann
#71. As an actor, I have to watch people and observe their behaviors - this is how I create characters.
Josh McDermitt
#72. Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am No-One. I observe everything, and to play with Nemo is to play games with Destruction.
Alan Moore
#73. I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens ... to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
Abraham Lincoln
#74. As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion ... if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.
Amor Towles
#75. Some sober part of my brain seemed to observe everything I did, clucking disdainfully, informing me that ought to be embarrassed, yet making no move
Rachel Hartman
#76. I really want the audience to place close attention to the movement, possibilities of movement, possibilities of trespassing boundaries and observe what's possible in different social settings, and different settings of class designation as well.
Todd Haynes
#77. if you take a positivist position, as I do, questions about reality don't have any meaning. All one can ask is whether imaginary time is useful in formulating mathematical models that describe what we observe.
Stephen Hawking
#78. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#79. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe and imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else respects, and everybody slights?
Charles Dickens
#80. I never gossip. I observe. And then relay my observations to practically everyone.
Gail Carriger
#81. If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
Jonathan Swift
#82. Roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, I was able to observe how a variety of vastly different nations organized themselves economically. The inescapable conclusion was that no politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity.
Louis Rukeyser
#83. Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.
Thomas Hobbes
#84. Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am nit so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#85. At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.
Richard Russo
#86. I understand that government should live within its means, value the money it holds in trust from you the taxpayer, avoid waste and, above all else, observe the first maxim of good government: namely, do no avoidable harm.
Tony Abbott
#87. I would like to go back and spend a Christmas with my family and myself when I was five years old and just see what that dynamic would be like. Observe it. I think it would be a magical gift.
Sharon Lawrence
#88. All I want from myself is to observe life. There's a glass sheet between me and it. I want the
glass to be perfectly clear, so that it will in no way hinder my examination of what's behind it,
but I always want the glass.
Fernando Pessoa
#89. Breathe.
Slow.
Observe.
Break the link between sensation and reaction.
Breathe into the gap between them.
Blind reaction is attachment.
Blind reaction is slavery.
Freedom exists in the gap.
Choice exists in the gap.
I exist in the gap.
Ramez Naam
#90. The premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable.
Oliver Goldsmith
#92. Sometimes I observe with curiosity that uninterrupted activity which, independent of the subject of any conversation I may be carrying on, continues its course in that department of my brain that is devoted to music.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
#93. How badly I even read. And with what malice and weakness I observe myself. Apparently I cannot force my way into the world, but lie quietly, receive, spread out within me what I have received, and then step calmly forth.
Franz Kafka
#94. Sometimes when I am in a situation that I have never been in, I kind of pull back a little bit to observe things; it doesn't really last long though I have to. I've resigned to myself to the fact that I have to be me.
Queen Latifah
#95. I think the very best thing you can do is observe what makes you stronger and what makes you weaker.
Frederick Lenz
#96. But I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.
Edward Gibbon
#97. I think I take little pieces of inspiration, then kind of do what's real to me and what's going on in my life or what I observe from other people's experiences and hope other people connect with it, too.
Tess Henley
#98. I'm not smart, but I like to observe.
Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why,
William Hazlitt
#99. The job is hard enough when the victims are men. But when I see violence done to the innocent, to women or children? It is never easy to observe, or investigate for that matter.
Shelley Gray
#100. I have come across both inspiring teachers of history and deplorable ones over the years, so one cannot generalise, except perhaps to observe that the profession seems to encourage anti-militarist sentiments.
Antony Beevor
