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Observer   Listen
noun
Observer  n.  
1.
One who observes, or pays attention to, anything; especially, one engaged in, or trained to habits of, close and exact observation; as, an astronomical observer. "The observed of all observers." "Careful observers may foretell the hour, By sure prognostic, when to dread a shower."
2.
One who keeps any law, custom, regulation, rite, etc.; one who conforms to anything in practice. "Diligent observers of old customs." "These... hearkened unto observers of times."
3.
One who fulfills or performs; as, an observer of his promises.
4.
A sycophantic follower. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Observer" Quotes from Famous Books



... surface that his material lay. There, in regions revealed only to the instrumental observer, were suns of hybrid kind—fire- fogs, floating nuclei, globes that flew in groups like swarms of bees, and other extraordinary sights—which, when decomposed by Swithin's equatorial, turned out to be ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... admitted, a rather formidable person to encounter in such wise. She was a busy, clever, worldly woman,—kind-hearted, too, and with both a strong will and strong affections. She was one of those people in whom even an astute observer might often be deceived, by failing to give her credit for certain good qualities which are commonly coexistent with worldliness,—especially in a woman. There was a spice of something better latent amid her shrewdness and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... the Council, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, Ph.D., F.R.G.S. etc., is without cavil the foremost of American botanists, an observer of international reputation and the author of several epochal treaties upon his chosen branch of science. His story, amazing in the best sense of that word as it may be, is fully supported by proofs brought ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... see processes. They notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood of this or that ancestor; they can detect the irrepressible movement of hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the common observer. To be a parent is almost to be a fatalist. This boy sits with legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw; his grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement of the eyebrows which we remember in one of them, and the gusty ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Angelo is no likeness of the inspired law-giver, nor of any other that ever lived, and Raphael's Madonnas are not the faces of women. As Reynolds says, "the effect of the capital works of Michael Angelo is that the observer feels his whole frame enlarged." It is creation, it is representing beings and things different from our nature, but true to their own. In this self-consistency is the only nature requisite in ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... the woman be rich and has a carriage, whether she is on foot, or is disguised, if she enters one of these Parisian defiles at any hour of the day, she compromises her reputation as a virtuous woman. If, by chance, she is there at nine in the evening the conjectures that an observer permits himself to make upon her may prove fearful in their consequences. But if the woman is young and pretty, if she enters a house in one of those streets, if the house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at the end of which flickers the pallid ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... At 2.30 p.m. we came in sight of the Great Ice Barrier. Slowly it rose up out of the sea until we were face to face with it in all its imposing majesty. It is difficult with the help of the pen to give any idea of the impression this mighty wall of ice makes on the observer who is confronted with it for the first time. It is altogether a thing which can hardly be described; but one can understand very well that this wall of 100 feet in height was regarded for a generation as an insuperable obstacle ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... wilderness of the backwoods; and what are they among so many? Look at the masses of lumberers: it is computed that on the Ottawa and its tributaries alone they number thirty thousand men; spending their Sabbaths, as a late observer has told us, in mending their clothes and tools, smoking and sleeping, and utterly without religion. Why should not the gospel be preached to these our brothers, and souls won for Christ ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... their course towards Oregon endured hardships and privations which tasked their fortitude to the uttermost. Mr. Burnett surveyed the scenes of the wilderness with the eye of an intelligent and sympathetic observer. Many of his remarks upon the phenomena of those untrodden plains are of unusual interest, whether he is discoursing upon animate ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... of an acute observer would have detected some difference beneath this outward varnish of similarity. The man at the wheel looked round the horizon more eagerly, and spit into the swirling, unwholesome-looking water with a more dejected air than before. The fishing-lines ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... we can do no more than mention a few. Perhaps the most famous, and dearest to the popular heart is John Burroughs, a nature philosopher, if there ever was one, a keen observer of the life of field and forest, and the author of a long list of lovable books. One of the leaders in the "return to nature" movement which has reached such wide proportions of recent years, he has held his position as its prophet and ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... that beauty in Miss Fenton which every common observer could not but see. The charms of her mind and of her fortune had been pointed out by his tutor; and the utility of the marriage, in perfect submission to his precepts, he never ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... fact which strikes the observer, is, that as a general rule, there is not only an addition to the crop by the addition of those artificial manures, but there is, in some cases, more absolute crop produced by them than by farm-yard ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson

... lignum-vitae being proof against them. They are not seen at the surface, as they never touch the outer shell of the wood whose heart they are consuming. A beam or rafter which has been attacked by them looks as good as when new, to the casual observer, until it is sounded and found to be hollow, a mere shell in fact. Even in passing from one piece of timber to another, the red ant does so by covered ways, and is thus least seen when most busy. The timbers of an entire ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... small scale. The huntsman stood over giving his orders. One enthusiastic man, who had been lying on his belly, grovelling in the mud for five minutes, with a long stick in his hand, was now applying the point of it scientifically to his nose. An ordinary observer with a magnifying-glass might have seen a hair at the end of the stick. "He's there," said the enthusiastic man, covered with mud, after a long-drawn, eager sniff at the stick. The huntsman deigned to give one glance. "That's rabbit," said the huntsman. A conclave was immediately formed over ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... was an ebb and flood tide, of unusual extent, within half-an-hour. At another, a belt of land, including a burying-ground, was washed away, so that according to the observer "it appeared as if the dead had sought shelter with the living in a neighbouring cocoa-nut garden!" Elsewhere the tides were seen to advance and recede ten or twelve times—in one case even twenty times—on ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... has been done to those people and in those countries; heretofore the truth has been studiously hidden from him, that it is his duty to extirpate so many evils and bring succour to that new world, given him by God, as to one who is a lover and observer of justice, whose glorious, and happy life and Imperial state may God Almighty long prosper, to the relief of all his universal Church, and for the final salvation of his own ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... had formerly been true; then also the new sect produced vehement psychical disturbance wherever it touched the surrounding population, and many things occurred which might, or might not, be termed miracles, according to the interpretation of the observer. It was no longer possible for Joseph Smith to ride, as he had done on the day of Susannah's marriage, with a minister of one of the older sects. He became very notorious, and to every one except those who were ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... air at the same time on an artillery machine, the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes. There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret with a machine-gun. Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and a second passenger rode in the tail ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll

... knew that Steevens was writing for the 'Pall Mall' and the 'Cambridge Observer,' and it soon became evident that journalism was to be his life-work. Last February I met him in the Strand, and he was much changed: no more crush hat, and long hair, and Bohemian manners. He was back from the East, and a great man now—married and settled as well—very ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... excellent philosopher who has given this wonderful instrument of power to civil society was led to the great improvements he made by the discoveries of a kindred genius on the heat absorbed when water becomes steam, and of the heat evolved when steam becomes water. Even the most superficial observer must allow in this case a triumph of science, for what a wonderful impulse has this invention given to the progress of the arts and manufactories in our country, how much has it diminished labour, how much has it increased the real strength of the ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... returned to the shadowy low library filled with its evidences of good taste. Newmark threw himself into the armchair. He was quite recovered, once again the imperturbable, coldly calculating, cynical observer. Orde relocked the door, and ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White

... is necessary to get rid of a difficulty raised by Mr. Lang. "In no tribe with female descent can a district have its local totem as among the Arunta.... This can only occur under male reckoning of descent."[383] But surely so acute an observer as Mr. Lang would see that with female descent right through, as it exists among the Khasia and Kocch people of Assam, local totem centres are just as possible as with male descent. Mr. Lang is conscious of some ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... Manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling—unstamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have translated all the tangle thus: 'Look out! You laughed at me once, and now I am going ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... shrewd observer, Sir Francis Walsingham, just two weeks before the bloody Sunday of the massacre, and eight days before the marriage of Navarre, little suspecting, in spite of his anxiety, the flood of misery which was so soon to burst upon that devoted ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... walls, two low stories, and a high roof. Entering it from the court behind the house, every portion of it would seem to an ordinary beholder quite accounted for; but it might have suggested itself to a more comprehending observer, that a considerable space must lie between the roof and the low ceiling of the first floor, which was taken up with the servants' rooms. Of the ground floor, part was used as a dairy, part as a woodhouse, ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... a few of my personal traits even indicating roughly my bringing-up and where. She is not a professional fortune-teller, and merely ventured a few statements. My impression was that she was an unusually close and alert observer. Like her mother she is somewhat taciturn. I should have said that her mother was reserved as well as forgetful. The mother never ventured a word except in answer to a question, and used ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... attitude is languid, the handling of his cane gracefully indolent, the almost habitual twisting of his chestnut-brown mustache attractively self-satisfied. His clothing is handsome, of distinctive materials, and tailored to the day. So much for an observing estimate. The critical observer would note more. He would detect a sluggishness in the responses of the pupils, as the eyes listlessly travel from face to face, producing an effect of haunting dulness. Mumbling movements of the lips, a slightly incoordinate swaying ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... through the war safely, I am glad to say. Ptes. Fail and Ewart were destined to act as my observers both with this brigade and in the 42nd Division in 1918. And I cannot speak too highly of the excellent work done by Pte. Fail. Owing to exceptional eyesight he was a first-class counter-battery observer, and later on his skill with the pencil did the Germans a lot of damage. On this front he spotted the flash of a 4-inch gun battery that used to shell B.H.Q., with the result that the heavy gunners fired on this battery and silenced ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley

... modern factory system is a small fraction of that by the old workshop system. The fact that the former has beaten the latter in the race of competition would prove it, if it were not evident to the most careless observer. But it is also a fact that the trust, apart from its character as a monopoly, is actually a means of cheapening production over the system by independent factories, for it carries it on on a larger scale than it has ever before been conducted. Our review of the trust from the ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker

... insisted that they should prove their sincerity by pledging to follow the line of conduct he had lain down, and they did so with such readiness that a superficial observer would have declared the mission ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis

... of the bones of the horse, or the ass, current in veterinary works, would fit those of Anchitherium. And, in a general way, this may be true enough; but there are some most important differences, which, indeed, are justly indicated by the same careful observer. Thus the ulna is complete throughout, and its shaft is not a mere rudiment, fused into one bone with the radius. There are three toes, one large in the middle and one small on each side. The femur is quite like ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... keeping the leading matter continually before the mind. And others have added that such a course will enable one to observe relations between the subject and other things that will not be apparent to the careless observer ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... admitted; but no other State, even of those surrounding them, has followed their example, though the people have repeatedly voted on the point. Whatever progress the cause may have made in England, or in the larger cities of the East, I think that no unprejudiced observer would say that it looks so near to accomplishment as it did in the twenty years preceding the Civil War. Then, also, there was during the same decades a great increase in personal property; that is to say, in corporate stocks and ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... boy," said Dr. Desprez, "I told you already you had the vices of philosophy; if you display the virtues also, I must go. I am a student of the blessed laws of health, an observer of plain and temperate nature in her common walks; and I cannot preserve my equanimity in presence of a monster. Do ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... on the other hand, he is a keen observer and an apt student. Although an idealist by nature, many of the race have proved themselves good business men. But under the reservation system they have developed traits that are absolutely opposed to the racial type. They become time-serving, beggarly, and apathetic. Some of their finest ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman

... what thoughtful men had to say with regard to his race, Ensal leaned back in his chair, determined to give earnest attention to this observer of American life, whose very hostility assured the acuteness ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way; namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his Critical Essays; or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his Satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... many miss, are the Botanical Gardens hard by Magdalen Bridge. Their situation on the brink of the River Cherwell, and almost under the shadow of Magdalen Tower, is what probably appeals most strongly to the ordinary observer, while those who merely pass the gardens by will delight in the gateway, the work of Inigo Jones, with its statues of Charles I and II. Formal these gardens are of necessity, but there hangs about them a certain feeling of antiquity. They somehow seem to take their place ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How

... recognise the correlation of structure to function, for this is a fact which imposes itself upon every observer. He recognised also correlation between functions, as when he pointed out the connection between increased respiration and enhanced muscular activity in birds.[125] He interpreted structure at times in terms of function, the short, strong clavicle of the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... even in later life paid an insincere, because undeserved, deference to outward show, and to the surface opinions counterfeiting depth, so attractive to the superficial observer—added to which, had he possessed a portion of that self-regarding policy which frequently aids success—he might have been idolized where he was neglected, and rewarded, if I might so profane this word, with high worldly honours in other quarters. But it was otherwise; and could a crown of gold ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... moon. One gazed at the dark edge of a mountain range to see it suddenly grow light; to see the illumination increase both in area and intensity, precisely like a sunrise over a mountain range here on earth. The spectacle was as suggestive as it was sublime. It brought the observer into a new relation to the universe. The sun that lights the earth was then rising on the moon. One realized a new conception of the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... microscope will ever be powerful enough to detect, but which the intelligent observer sees with the naked eye, are rare enough in Europe, and I am not aware of their existence out of it. A small collection of them might be brought together in France, in Spain, in England, in Russia, in Germany, in Italy. Rome is one of the cities in which the fewest would be found. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... then read Mrs. Trollope's work on America, or I should have comprehended at once the cause of her indignation; for she was just such a person as would have drawn forth the keen satire of that far-seeing observer of the absurdities of our nature, whose witty exposure of American affectation has done more towards producing a reform in that respect, than would have resulted from a ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... think, from this statement, that Mary Louise was prone to suspect everyone she met; it was only on rare occasions she instinctively felt there was more beneath the surface of an occurrence than appeared to the casual observer, and then, if a wrong might be righted or a misunderstanding removed—but only in such event—she eagerly essayed to discover the truth. It was in this manner that she had once been of great service ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)

... them, but they will never be like the odious viragoes of the Roman circus. At any rate, if any woman acts according to the dictum of the philosopher after reading my bitterly true words, we shall hold that our influence is departed. Therefore with ruthless composure I follow my observer—a man whose pure and holy spirit upheld him as he ministered to ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... to relieve my feelings. No; if she ever accepts me, I wish it to be in a large, vacant spot of the universe, peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practised repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, 'for that way ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... spoils taken from Austria,—Venice and Lombardy. The change in his political plans was the consequence of the change in his military plan,—though either change may be pronounced the cause or the effect, according to the point from which the observer views the entire series of transactions. Thus the peace of 1859 may be considered to have been a benefit to Italy, just as the war it terminated had been. The war freed her from Austrian dominion; the peace, from its character, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... comments on China's prospective commercial development Mr. Colquhoun, the latest first-hand observer, sets forth some statistics which are of interest not only to Englishmen but to Americans. He shows that in 1896 the total net value of imports and of exports was 55,768,500 pounds, and the total gross ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... blemish to the rest, and as Solomon says, 'One sinner destroyeth much good.' p. 527. It is more congenial to our fallen nature to notice, and be grieved with, evil conduct, than it is to rejoice over that excellence which may cast the observer into the shade; besides the jaundiced fear that good works may arise from improper motives. These principles equally applied to the state of society under the Presbyterian government: but when the restoration to the old system took place, so vast ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... may be summarised by saying that under one of the systems of kinship organisation (the two-phratry), half of the members of the tribe in a given generation are related to a given man, A, and the other half to his wife. More than one observer assures us that there is a solidarity about the tribe, which regards some, if not all other tribes as "wild blacks," though it may be on terms of friendship and alliance with certain neighbours, and feel itself united to them by a bond ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... attracted her most of all. It was somewhat chubby, and when the mouth was expanded by the almost incessant smile the cheeks were wrinkled like corrugated iron. His head was bald, save for a few tufts of hair above the ears. His bulging eyes twinkled with good humour, causing an observer to feel that their owner was well satisfied with himself and the ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody

... a slight color rise in Mrs. Long's cheek, but no observer less jealous than I would have detected it; and there was not a shade less warmth than usual ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... felt very perceptibly to-day in the vocal world. Great principles, great truths, are of slow growth, slow development. Times change, however, and we change with them. While the changes may be slow and almost imperceptible to the observer, they are sure, and finally become evident by the ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... real division is no longer between political parties, or even between party factions, is apparent to the observer who has given the question any ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn

... was that Guy Oscard never attempted to degrade Durnovo from his post of joint commander. This puzzled the half-breed sorely. It may have been that Oscard knew men better than his indifferent manner would have led the observer to believe. Durnovo's was just one of those natures which in good hands might have been turned to good account. Too much solitude, too much dealing with negro peoples, and, chiefly, too long a sojourn in the demoralising atmosphere of West ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... of Rocky Mountain locusts in Nebraska, a scientific observer watched a long-billed marsh wren carry thirty locusts to her young in an hour and the same number was kept up regularly. At this rate, for seven hours a day, a nest-ful of young wrens would eat two hundred and ten locusts a day. From this he calculated that the birds of eastern Nebraska ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... Cyprians and citizens, noble and ignoble—in short, a mighty rendezvous, where every variety of character is to be found, from the finished sharper to the finished gentleman; a scene pregnant with subject for the pencil of the humorist, and full of the richest materials for the close observer of men and manners. Hither we retired to make a night of it, or rather to consume the hours between midnight and morning's dawn. The place itself is fitted up in a very novel and attractive style of decoration, admirably calculated for a saloon ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... made by Mrs. Headley to her own riper years, one might have been induced to consider her rather in the decline of life; but such was not the case. Her splendid and matronly figure might indeed have impressed the superficial observer with the belief that she had numbered more than forty summers, but the unchained and luxuriant hair—the white, even and perfect teeth— the rich, full lip, and unwrinkled brow, and smooth and brilliant cheek, would not have permitted the woman most ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson

... though they were, rather oppressive. They had not—how could they have?—the undergraduate's virtue of taking Oxford as a matter of course. The Germans loved it too little, the Colonials too much. The Americans were, to a sensitive observer, the most troublesome—as being the most troubled—of the whole lot. The Duke was not one of those Englishmen who fling, or care to hear flung, cheap sneers at America. Whenever any one in his presence said that America was not large ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... said darkly, although her dazzling smile belied her tone. That first kiss, casual-seeming as it had been, had carried vastly more freight than any observer could perceive. "I'll hunt Bill up and make passes at him, see if I ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... results are attained, whether by a chemical preparation, or by the influence of a certain mental condition, or by thickness of skin, or whether all the witnesses fable with a singular unanimity (shared by photographic cameras), I am unable even to guess. On May 21, in Bulgaria, a scientific observer might come to a conclusion. At present I think it possible that the Jewish 'Passing through the Fire' may ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... were going on at Campo-Formio, the young general had established a brilliant court. "His salons," an observer informs us, "were filled with a throng of generals, officials, and purveyors, as well as the highest nobility and the most distinguished men of Italy, who came to solicit the favor of a glance or a moment's conversation." He appears already to have conceived the rle that he was to play ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... writhed with the fear that she was finding more than friendship to enjoy in her daily intercourse with the good-looking Mr. Ridge. Gradually it became noticeable that he was watching her every act with spiteful eyes, and more than one observer winked softly at his neighbor, and shook his head ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon

... of Verdun, as it is disclosed to an observer who stands on Fort de la Chaume, a mile or two west and above Verdun and in the mouth of the trough we have described, was this: On the west bank of the Meuse, four or five miles northwest of the town, there is a steep ridge going east and west ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds

... in the world who prides himself on knowing a thing or two, it is the spruce young man who presides over a soda fountain. This particular young gentleman did not even deem a reply necessary. He vanished an instant, and when he returned a close observer might have seen that the mixture in the glass he bore had slightly changed color and increased in quantity. But the elder saw only the whizzing stream of water dart into its center, and the rosy foam rise and tremble on the glass's rim. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... imagined that all these strangers would have made her nervous,' thought Audrey; but it needed a close observer to detect any mark of uneasiness in Mrs. Blake's voice or manner. Now and then there might be a slight flush, an involuntary movement of the well-gloved hands, a quick start or turn of the head, ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... her appearance. Endowed by nature with strong powers and violent passions, experience had taught her to employ the one, and to conceal, if not to moderate, the other. She was a severe adn strict observer of the external forms, at least, of devotion; her hospitality was splendid, even to ostentation; her address and manners, agreeable to the pattern most valued in Scotland at the period, were grave, dignified, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... counted the stars, and made such a catalogue of them as his Chaldean preceptors had used, he would very speedily come to the conclusion, that so far as he could see, they were by no means innumerable; for the catalogue of Hipparchus reckons only one thousand and twenty-two as visible to one observer, and the whole number visible in both hemispheres by the naked eye does not exceed eight thousand.[309] And even if we suppose, that these old patriarchs had better eyes, as we know they had a clearer sky, than modern western ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... of things found at least one observer, a personage of no less authority in household matters than Paula, the tall and stately woman of Nubian lineage who had been the nurse of Eve, and who every morning now stood behind her chair at breakfast, familiarly joining in and gathering what she chose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... aims were for eminence in a still higher sphere, and he readily abandoned the road to worldly distinctions when he thought that his duty towards God required the sacrifice.' Of course I only quote this as evidence of the impression which Mr. Hope had made on an individual observer, [Footnote: It is perfectly just.—W. E. G.] not as instituting any comparison, which would be wholly ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... her husband in proportion as he seemed alienated through the wanderings of disease? And was not this her position? So she said within herself, and meanwhile it was not hard to penetrate her changing thoughts, at least for so keen an observer as Aunt Jane. Hope, at length, almost ceased to speak of Malbone, and revealed her grief by this evasion, as the robin reveals her ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... have said it aloud, for the young man across the way sprang to his feet and was at her side instantly. A keen observer might have drawn the conclusion that he had been waiting for some ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... is flowing through the wire, and the polarity of the soft-iron bar is determined by the DIRECTION of flow of current around it for the time being. If the direction is reversed, the polarity will also be reversed. Assuming, for instance, the bar to be end-on toward the observer, that end will be a south pole if the current is flowing from left to right, clockwise, around the bar; or a north pole if flowing in the other direction, as illustrated at the right of the figure. It is immaterial which way the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... stage: This is the stage of throwing in a cage or from behind and over obstacles. There are three distinct phases of this feature of the training: (1.) The thrower sees the target but must throw over an obstacle. (2.) The target is invisible; the thrower is aided by an observer and a periscope; the observer notes the fall of the grenades and gives directions as follows—"So many yards right or left" or "Shorten or lengthen so many yards." (3.) Actual throwing in trenches. This stage immediately precedes that of "working up ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker

... was due to conflicting national policies. While each side accused the other of selfish ends, it is not apparent to a disinterested observer that either was unduly selfish in its policy, or was doing more than every country ought to advance the interests and promote the welfare of its people. Russia naturally had a great deal of interest in Manchuria, and felt that she had a right to expand through the uncivilized regions of Manchuria, ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... to the ordinary observer, there was nothing awful about the fireplace. Everything in the way of bric-a-brac possessed by the Santa Maria flatters was artistic. It may have been in the Lease that only people with esthetic tastes were to be admitted ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... responded equally. After the war, therefore, it was inevitable that the laboring classes should become restive under prevailing economic conditions. No more important question faced the country, a keen observer declared, than that concerning the wages of the laboring man: "How are the masses of men and women who labor with their hands to be secured out of the products of their toil what they will feel to be and will be in ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... seen by a distant observer, a singular spectacle was unfolded. The straggling train suddenly seemed to resolve itself into a large widening circle of horsemen, revolving round and partly hiding the few heavy wagons that were being ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte

... immediately distinguished him and set him apart in every company. The appreciative observer said at once: "Here is a man who may not himself be great; but he is at least great enough to understand greatness; ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... beside "Lin-Le" and Mr. Meadows, give the same testimony to the Christian character of this great movement in China. Captain Fishbourne, describing his visit in H.M.S. Hermes to Nan-king, says: "It was obvious to the commonest observer that they were practically a different race." They had the Scriptures, many seemed to him to be practical Christians, serious and religious, believing in a special Providence, thinking that their trials were sent to purify them. "They accuse us of magic," said ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... expression, which, on a superficial survey, seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes, after a while, to the faithful observer its own standard by which to appreciate it. Daily these proportions widened and towered more and more upon my sight, and I got, at last, a proper foreground for these sublime distances. Before coming away, I think I really saw the full wonder of the ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... there is some more or less definite order of development, paralleling to a certain extent the growth of instincts, is probable, but nothing more definite is known than observation teaches. For instance, every observer of children knows that memory for objects develops before memory for words; that memory for gestures preceded memory for words; that memory for oral language preceded memory for written language; that memory for concrete objects preceded memory for abstractions. Further knowledge ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... suppose that marriage is the same thing as love, and that being a man suffices to make a wife love you? Have you gathered nothing in your boudoir experience but pleasant memories? I tell you that everything in our bachelor life leads to fatal errors in the married man unless he is a profound observer of the human heart. In the happy days of his youth a man, by the caprice of our customs, is always lucky; he triumphs over women who are all ready to be triumphed over and who obey their own desires. One thing after another—the obstacles ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... more than an observer. Orders were sent direct to the right wing or reserve, ignoring me, and advances were made from one line of intrenchments to another without notifying me. My position was so embarrassing in fact that I made several applications during the siege ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant

... Billy, "you see, I—well, I ran away from—from many things. You see, you and I are cast in different moulds. You are six feet tall, physically and temperamentally." Rita thought Billy was the most acute observer in Christendom, but she did not speak, save with her eyes. Those eyes nowadays were ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... therefore, before she made Violet entirely forget herself and her recent sadness, and the young girl soon found herself laughing heartily over some droll incident of which Mrs. Hawley had recently been the amused and appreciative observer. ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... some years younger, and was neither so tall nor so strongly built as his companion. His countenance was decidedly handsome, and what would be called aristocratic. It was very grave, and, indeed, melancholy in the extreme; and an accurate observer of character might have divined, from the form of his mouth and expression of his eyes, that he was sadly in want of firmness and decision in his actions, which idea, probably, would not have been very far from the truth. His dress, though the materials were good, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... pleased to take notice that the copy of verses by the title of 'Rablophila', premised to the first book of this translation, being but a kind of mock poem, in imitation of somewhat lately published (as to any indifferent observer will easily appear, by the false quantities in the Latin, the abusive strain of the English, and extravagant subscription to both), and as such, by a friend of the translator's, at the desire of some frolic gentlemen of his acquaintance, more ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... newcomer soon became something more than that of a critical observer; he hired out to him, and says with pride, "I made every pin ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell

... My authority for the story is the principal observer, who was also an actor in a part of this subsidiary little drama: A. I. Markoff, who at that time represented the semi-official Russian Telegraph Agency, as its head correspondent in Berlin. He himself told me ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... his most acute observations and his most ingenious speculation, he could never understand the real significance of the cities, since he is not acquainted with the actual living unit. Imagine now, if you will, that this supramundane observer invents a telescope which enables him to perceive more minute objects and thus discovers human beings. What a complete revolution this would make in his knowledge of mundane affairs! We can imagine how rapidly discovery would follow discovery; how it would be found that it was the human ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... degraded each moment, as the hardness of the deck began to make my knees sore. When I had done about half of the cabin (in a lazy, neglectful way, leaving patches unscrubbed, only just wetted over, so as to seem clean to a chance observer) I thought that I would do no more; but wait till Mr. Jermyn came to me. I would tell him that I wished to go home, that I was not going to be a common sailor, but a trusted messenger, with a lot more to the same tune, meaning, really, that I hated this job of washing decks ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield

... hill. Looking back, just as he reached the crest, he could see, knowing where it was, a very light smoke curling up over a clump of trees which intervened between him and the fire, but it was so slight that he was convinced that it would not be noticed by an ordinary observer. Sam saw at once, on reaching the top of the hill, that the guerillas were crowded round the waggon, which stood at the edge of a small clump of trees in the middle of the village. The moment was favourable, and he at once started forward, sometimes making a detour, so as to ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty

... the side next the Chapter House, the same observer noted "books chained on wooden desks, which brethren can come and read when they please." The library was for serious study, the cloister for daily reading, probably in ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark

... accompanied by the introduction of a new set of animals, though the changes in the organic world are not so striking as those which coincide with the mountain-upheavals. Still, to the eye of the geologist they are quite as distinct, though less evident to the ordinary observer. To these divisions it seems to me that the name of Period is rightly applied, because they seem to have been brought about by the steady action of time, and by gradual changes, rather than by any sudden or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... as a portraiture of the man Lincoln, Mr. Herndon's work 'will never be surpassed.' Certainly it has never been equaled yet, and this new edition is all that could be desired."—New York Observer. ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright

... up as sharply as though the point of a sword had been held at my throat. One marmoset is sufficiently like another to deceive the ordinary observer, but unless I was permitting a not unnatural prejudice to influence my opinion, this particular specimen was the pet of ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... determine these points, a second test was made, on March 31st, 1908, twenty days after the first one. In this test, green aniline, red potassium permanganate, and bran were used. An observer was placed at the end of the 10-in. line at B (Fig. 2), and, by letting a small quantity of water run from a relief-valve there, he was able to note the time of the appearance of the ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell

... From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr. Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... position more pitiable than mine. It is true that I never made a confidant of you. I never made one of Richard. I had a secret, and he surprised it. You were less fortunate." It might have seemed to a thoroughly dispassionate observer that in these last four words there was an infinitesimal touch of tragic irony. Gertrude paused a moment while Luttrel eyed her intently, and Richard, from a somewhat tardy instinct of delicacy, walked over to the bow-window. "This is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... virtues and vices. Probably nowhere in the world can more beautiful and more reverent types be found than in some of the Catholic countries of Europe which are but little touched by the intellectual movements of the age, but no good observer can fail to notice how much larger is the place given to duties which rest wholly on theological considerations, and how largely even the natural duties are based on such considerations and governed, limited, and sometimes even superseded by them. The ecclesiastics ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... century B.C. a large body of criminal law existed, supposedly collected by Li K'uei, which became the foundation of all later Chinese law. It seems that in this period the states of China moved quickly towards a money economy, and an observer to whom the later Chinese history was not known could have predicted the eventual development of a capitalistic society out ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... to stay until the moment to come out and mingle with the throng of other Brothers of Pity. Once with the bodies in the crypt of the cathedral, I was to await Seraphina there, and, together, we should slip through a side door on to the shore. Cesar, to throw any observer off the scent (three Lugarenos were to be admitted to see the bodies put in their coffins), posted two of the Riego negroes with loaded muskets on guard before the door of my empty room, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... balloon, of sausage shape, carrying an observer whose duty it is to spot artillery fire, etc. The balloon is paid out on a cable attached to a winch. Such balloons are always given protecting ground batteries ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke

... beauties of Bach's Violin writings is within neither my province nor capacity. As an amateur Violinist and an observer of all that relates to the Violin, I may refer, however, to the vast amount of good which the compositions of Bach have exercised upon the cultivation of Violin-playing, and the marvellous development ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart



Words linked to "Observer" :   witnesser, attender, motile, someone, viewer, seer, eyeglass wearer, observer's meridian, informant, somebody, audile, finder, beholder, soul, perceiver, spotter, watcher, listener, person, noticer, auditor, percipient, discoverer, looker, individual, hearer



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