Unbiased Observation Quotes

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

O Lord, may I never want to look good. O Jesus, may I always read it all: out loud and the very way it should be. May I never look at the other findings until I have come to my own true conclusions: May I care for the least of the young: and become aware of the one poem that each may have written; may I be aware of what each thing is, delighted with form, and wary of the false comparison; may I never use the word "brilliant."

It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

I'd like to be invisible. To be anonymous and see things for what they really are. The truth may be painful but it's probably useful!

Seeing everything just the way it is gives you the power and capability to walk through life effortlessly.

I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.

In the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning - in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around; just you have to put your mind aside.

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth.

Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.

It's very difficult to look at it in a kind of a free manner, what reality is. That was my first struggle, to see it as it is, rather than tainted by my own previous thoughts.

Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.... In the beginner's mind there is no thought, 'I have attained something.' All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. We can really learn something.

Most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they've been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see - not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

I just need to make sure I don't get in my own way of a truthful and organic moment. Regardless of the research involved, at the end of the day, I have to show up, breathe, and listen.

How can you do anything until you have seen everything,or as much as you can?

When you aren't affiliated with anything, and then you look at something, you look at it with your eye to the best of your ability.

A lot of times it's the child that sees something and not the grownup. I love that because, when readers get older, they start looking for the most important ideas in the story. They don't look at things in the same way anymore. Children haven't really learned to do that yet. They take all their great, intellectual skills, look at the full page, and appreciate all of the different things.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.

Reality - the way that is, exactly as it is, in every moment - is always kind. It's our story about reality that blurs our vision, obscures what's true, and leads us to believe that there is injustice in the world. I sometimes say that you move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer.