Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.
|
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
|
Age affects how people experience time. The observations on this are well known, so it is only necessary to outline briefly what has been the experience of everyone I have ever talked to or read about: the years go faster as one gets older. At the age of four or six, a year seems interminable; at sixty, the years begin to blend and are frequently hard to separate from each other because they move so fast! There are, of course, a number of common-sense explanations for this sort of thing. If you have only lived five years, a year represents 20 percent of your life; if you have lived fifty years, that same year represents only 2 percent of your life, and since lives are lived as wholes, this logarithmic element would make it difficult to maintain the same perspective on the experience of a year
|
'The drugs Prednisone and Vincristine are often hailed as 'curing' childhood leukemia. Both drugs were rejected by the US National Cancer Institute as 'useless' on the basis of animal tests. Prednisone was developed as a result of clinical observation of the effects of adrenal extract. Vincristine is an alkaloid of 'Vincra Rosea', a type of periwinkle plant, and extracts of periwinkle were used in the Roman Empire to 'dry tumours' (Pliny). They were eventually brought to clinical trials. The children cured of leukemia owe their lives to clinical observations and trials - and not to the animal 'model'.'
|
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
|
The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . .
|
By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.
|
I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing -- it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.
|
All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.
|
To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.
|
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
|
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
|
Those who have the command of the arms in a country are masters of the state, and have it in their power to make what revolutions they please. Thus, there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.
|
Passion makes the best observations and the sorriest conclusions.
|
Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.
|
It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.
|