A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.
Only when you're in that ditch, lying there in the muddy runoff you've made of your life, gazing up at the peak you fell from, do you truly know how small you are and understand how tall you used to be.
The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery. Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity's attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it.
If the people in the audience are talking, you're being ignored. If the people are gazing at you, you've got something they want to hear.
At the age of eight, I bought my first telescope and would spend hours gazing at the moon and stars. I remember thinking what it must have been like when man first realized that we were only a very small part of the overall picture.
I try not to be super self-referential about my work because it becomes like navel gazing at a certain point.
As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.
Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly.
In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants.
When I first drove my car down Sunset Strip, I nearly crashed my car gazing at the monolithic ads of various celebrities. They are bigger than King Kong, and more frightening.
