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.

- Anne Sullivan

The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

- Francis Bacon

The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence. When I first read this statement, the thought, "What nonsense!" shot through my mind before I realized that I had just made an evaluation.

- Marshall Rosenberg

The highest form of intelligence is the ability to observe without evaluating.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

- Rudolf Arnheim

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.

- John Dewey

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.

- Louis Pasteur

You can observe a lot just by watching.

- Yogi Berra

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.

- William S. Burroughs