Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I think generally I'm kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone's head, that being all they really know of the world.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that, you have lost everything.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

The private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person you that you were. You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

There is no truth except the truth that exists within you. Everything else is what someone is telling you.

What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies with that which is here set forth.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it.

It is not in the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.