Observing People Quotes

“I hear news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, strategems, and fresh alarms. […] Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news. Amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities, and cares, simplicity and villany; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves, I rub on in a private life; as I have still lived, so I now continue, as I was content from the first, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestick discontents: saving that sometimes, not to tell a lie, as Diogenes went into the city, and Democritus to the haven, to see fashions,I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, lookinto the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, not so wise an observer as a plain rehearser, not as they did to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy Of Melancholy: What It Is, With All The Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Progonosticks, And Severall Cures Of It. In Three Portions. With Their ... Medicinally, Historically Opened And

“I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children are often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.”
― Rachel Cusk, Transit

“People think that seeing is blaming. They assume that through articulating what's happening that they're being judged, and ridiculed, when they're actually just being seen. I don't mean to condemn. A scientist doesn't judge the organisms in a petri dish. Scientific experiments aren't about making the organisms right or wrong for doing what they're doing. It's about watching how they work, and getting to know how they behave and interact.”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth