("Ask yourself whether you are happy," observed John Stuart Mill, "and you cease to be so").
"My friend has never seemed so happy," observed another.
I was happy to observe a notebook on his table.
"I'd prefer to be happy," he observes.
I was also happy to observe that, within the buoys, the water seemed cleaner than the rest of the lake.
"I am happy to observe that the decades of vulgar excess are finally over," the columnist India Knight wrote in The Times of London.
He seems at his happiest simply observing the weather, and many entries include quiet descriptions of the sun and sky, the rain and clouds.
They decided to restrict themselves simply to describing behaviors that were visible to the human eye: they couldn't tell you why someone developed obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, but they were happy to observe that such a person is often "over-conscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality".
Although most of the guests were people who had already figured out their own victory strategies without recourse to Welch's bullet points, all were happy to observe Welch's eighth and last rule of leadership, as expressed on page 78: "Leaders celebrate".
My teenagers were more than happy to observe the singles scene around us as we ate pizza at York's Landing overlooking the Idler Riverboat Pub, a stationary open-deck party boat, as we listened to a live band playing Jimmy Buffett and Hootie and the Blowfish.
It is also noticeable, we think, that both in France and Italy public opinion supports British efforts on behalf of peace, and there is one moral, drawn, we are happy to observe, by a Jingo contemporary, that the influence of Great Britain at this crisis and her strength as a mediator are due to the fact that "she alone of the Great Powers is not bound by a definite alliance".
