Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.

You should not only have attention to everything, but a quickness of attention, so as to observe at once all the people in the room--their motions, their looks and their words--and yet without staring at them and seeming to be an observer.

Lundist held that a man who can observe is a man apart. Such a man can see opportunities where others see only the obstacles

Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment, no matter where one happens to be.

There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal.

Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too."

Over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't. And I observe a lot. I see a lot around me. And over time you also get to understand the nature of man and the environments you are dealing with, and you can't always allow emotions and temper to flare up because you're displeased with something, or you want to change it.

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

Another thing all writers have in common is we're all observers. We pay attention to detail.

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.

I've often noticed" Fiona said, "that when people say, 'This can't happen in this day and age', they say it because it is happening.

More than anything else, if you can spend a great deal of dedicated time observing people without judgment, that can be a great way of learning.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.