Quotes about Perception
It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.
— Henry David Thoreau
It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception.
— Henry David Thoreau
There is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.
— Henry David Thoreau
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
— Henry David Thoreau
Do not engage to find things as you think they are.
— Henry David Thoreau
It matters not where or how far you travel,--the farther commonly the worse,--but how much alive you are.
— Henry David Thoreau
We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.
— Henry David Thoreau
The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
— Henry David Thoreau
With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.
— Henry David Thoreau
If you can speak what you will never hear,—if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things
— Henry David Thoreau
I was always conscious of sounds in nature which my ears could never hear,—that I caught but the prelude to a strain. She always retreats as I advance. Away behind and behind is she and her meaning. Will not this faith and expectation make to itself ears at length?
— Henry David Thoreau
Not all books are as dull as their readers.
— Henry David Thoreau