Onlooker Quotes
Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.
Meghan O'Rourke
He [Welles] was an onlooker at the clumsy, poignant suicide of "The Man on the Ledge," which took place in New York in 1938, when a boy perched for fourteen hours on a window-sill of the Gotham Hotel before plunging into the street. "I stood in the crowd outside for a long time," Welles says pensively, "and wanted to make a film of it all. But they tell me that in the Hollywood version of the film they gave the boy a reason for what he did. That's crazy. It's the crowd that needs explaining."
Orson Welles
If now, after the collapse, any of these lackeys of Adolf Hitler has the insolence to want to be considered as a harmless onlooker, then one can only wish he immediately feels the scourge of avenging mankind.... Whoever cries about having lost the totalitarian system or wants to resurrect National Socialism is to be treated as an incorrigible lunatic.
Friedrich Kellner
The image of the city and the obliterated streets of Rotterdam haunted me. When I returned to Paris, I made a draft model for a statue in clay which attempted to express the combination of confusion and horror.... to stimulate emotion in the onlooker, to exude something which captivates the spectator, which opens up to them an unsuspected pathway in their own soul.
Ossip Zadkine
The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.
An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously.
Arthur Eddington
Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others, it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation. Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.
Pope Benedict XVI
I remember a story my father used to tell. As he was coming home one day, he ran across a group of men who were firing on the troops from an ambush. During the excitement a daring onlooker went up to one of the snipers who seemed to be a poor marksman. He took the man's gun and brought down a soldier, then handed it back to its owner who motioned as if to say, 'No, go on. You're a better shot than I am.
Edgar Degas
The tragedy of Africa seemingly has no end. Viewing it from afar, the casual Western onlooker can be forgiven if the scenes begin to meld: Ethiopian famine in 1987, Somalian civil war and ensuing famine in 1992, and now Central Africa in 1997. The pictures and footage assume the role of media footnotes: snapshots of hopelessness, disaster, and death that seem as far away as the moon and as unrealistic as some science fiction film. Yet, like the African crises before it, the tragedy of Central Africa is very real and, in a global age, perhaps not as distant as some would like to think. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
Michael Johns
This book is in many ways unique. Nothing like it has before been published, as far as I know. It contains two series of talks by one of the Masters of the Wisdom to some members of His inner group, and also a series of personal instructions, given by Him to a group of His disciples. Many of these people were unknown to me when they were brought to my notice; some of them I have since met; others I have never met; some I knew well and could understand why they had been chosen, knowing that their dedication to the life of the spirit and their love of humanity warranted the choice; one or two were regarded by me as most unsuitable choices but later I altered my point of view and recognised that a wiser mind than mine was responsible for their inclusion in the Ashram. I learnt also that ancient relationships, established in other lives, were also conditioning factors and that some had earned the right to inclusion, even if their spiritual attainments seemed inadequate to the onlooker.
Alice Bailey
I remember a story my father used to tell. As he was coming home one day, he ran across a group of men who were firing on the troops from an ambush. During the excitement a daring onlooker went up to one of the snipers who seemed to be a poor marksman. He took the man's gun and brought down a soldier, then handed it back to its owner who motioned as if to say, 'No, go on. You're a better shot than I am.' But the stranger said, 'No, I'm not interested in politics.'
Edgar Degas
