Onlooker Quotes

#1. People have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.

William J. Mitchell

#2. I loved going to films, but as far as a movie buff, when I came into the movies at 16, life changed a little bit for me, from an onlooker to a person that lived within the industry. So now I would call myself a different sort of fan.

Debbie Reynolds

#3. I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker.

Diane Setterfield

#4. Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise.

Georges Braque

#5. Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker's responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.

Roger Kahn

#6. The act of copulation is like that of picking the nose. It's all right to be doing it yourself but it is a singularly unattractive spectacle for the onlooker.

Roald Dahl

#7. An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

Arnold Schoenberg

#8. If the actions used in performing sleights are visible or even suspected by the onlooker, the whole illusion of magic is destroyed.

Jean Hugard

#9. I'm learning in my own sort of quiet, out-of-the-spotlight kind of way. I certainly have my general point of view about the government, and the future of our children. I'm certainly learning all the time, I'm happy to be an onlooker for now.

Cathy Freeman

#10. When you're surrounded by friends and exes, there's a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they're hilarious.

Steven Moffat

#11. My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

Robert Frank

#12. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness.

Carlos Castenada

#13. Russia! Russia ... Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker's gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?

Nikolai Gogol

#14. Climbed that roost, alighted right there.
Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears.
A two-pronger her prize, a meat most rare.
Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear.

Darrell Drake

#15. The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

Marcel Duchamp

#16. Curing environmental ills requires not a stance outside nature, but a stance within nature, a role not as onlooker without, but as an actor within.

Valerius Geist

#17. The onlooker had better wipe the sympathy off his face. What he has seen is a revolution, not the home of little cogs and drones. What he has seen is the dormitory of the next managerial class.

William H. Whyte

#18. More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all--in order to become the public: that abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way, by all participants becoming a third party (an onlooker).

Soren Kierkegaard

#19. That answer was such a simple one that I could not imagine why I had not guessed it without having to be told. Those very obvious tactical victories are always the victories least foreseen by the onlooker, still less the opponent.

Anthony Powell

#20. Ninety percent of a shirt that not only was bright purple and green but with a design on it that, if you moved too quickly, might cause a seizure in an unsuspecting onlooker.

Lewis Black

#21. Two little drops in that river that flowed silently towards the unknown; two little drops that to themselves had so much individuality and to the onlooker were but an undistinguishable part of the water.

W. Somerset Maugham

#22. Granny Weatherwas was not a jouster in the lists of love, but, as an intelligent onlooker, she knew how the game was played.

Terry Pratchett

#23. The onlooker turns from the artist who has higher ideals and who cannot see his life purpose in an art without aims.

Wassily Kandinsky

#24. In his play he is no longer an onlooker merely; he is a part of the busy world of adults. He is practicing to take his place in that world when he is grown. He is getting is education.

Caroline Pratt

#25. The intrusion of history is not just theoretical. It is also the legacy of being an accomplice or a victim, or just an onlooker. In each case, history entails the uncomfortable presence of earlier unresolved roles.

Charles S. Maier

#26. Man in his usual perversity turns the footstool into a throne from whence he would feign direct the Almighty as to what He ought to do, giving the onlooker the impression that if God had half the compassion that those who pray (?) have, all would quickly be right

Arthur W. Pink

#27. Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.

Eric Hoffer

#28. Their bodies were different as were the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.

Sherwood Anderson

#29. The worst days of leadership beat the best days of being an onlooker.

Bill Hybels

#30. Whatever the nature of dance, it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness.

Curt Sachs

#31. A good seat on a horse steals away your opponent's courage and your onlooker's heart-what reason is there to attack? Sit like one who has conquered?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#32. Seriously, I dreamed that I was in my husband's dream, watching what he was dreaming about. Like, I was in his dream as an onlooker. It was so weird that I immediately wrote it down in the middle of the night. In the morning, it still sounded cool.

Lisa McMann