Quotes about Perception
Der Mensch behauptet, viel zu wissen; Doch seht nur, wie sie überschießen, Die Künste und die Wissenschaften, Die tausend Errungenschaften; Der Wind, der weht, Ist alles, was er versteht.
— Henry David Thoreau
If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire- thinner than the paper on which it is printed- then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.
— Henry David Thoreau
Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. That stuff is not made in any factory but their own.
— Henry David Thoreau
We shall see but little if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
— Henry David Thoreau
Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature and, through her, God.
— Henry David Thoreau
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, [...] compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
— Henry David Thoreau
Some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early enough.
— Henry David Thoreau
The poem of the world is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it.
— Henry David Thoreau
the conductor shouts All aboard! when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will be, A melancholy accident.
— Henry David Thoreau
is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?
— Henry David Thoreau
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
— Henry David Thoreau
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts
— Henry David Thoreau