Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Knowledge is grateful to the understanding, as light to the eyes.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Look for the stars, you'll say that there are none; / Look up a second time, and, one by one, / You mark them twinkling out with silvery light, / And wonder how they could elude the sight!

To-night when the full-bellied moon swallows the stars. Grant that I know.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

Light is constant, we just turn over in it.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

... every time you look at the world and the people in it closely, lovingly, imaginatively, it changes you. The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine.

Fashion is not easy. You have to change your eye to look for beauty all the time.

The answers to our questions are everywhere; we just need to change the lens with which we see the world.

Our inability to see the beauty doesn't suggest in the slightest that beauty is not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with broad enough perspective to see the beauty.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

If you're looking at things with the right set of eyes, people are endlessly fascinating. And then, of course, if you look at it the wrong way, then the whole world is horrible and tedious and boring. That's the battle, really--to keep looking at the world in the right way.

It’s never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can’t see them.

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

Subject is known by what she sees.

Go fast enough to get there, but slow enough to see.

In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure out these different relationships and rules.

Ah walk doon Hammersmith Broadway, London seeming strange and alien, after only a three-month absence, as familiar places do when you’ve been away. It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the wey things are in a dream. They say you have to live in a place to know it, but you have to come fresh tae really see it.