Louis Sullivan Quotes

You can observe a lot by watching.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend

Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

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

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time.

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

My motivation is to get a deeper understanding and exploration of something that I want to know about the human condition. So, that's what I look for in the material I read: if it's asking a genuine question about a concept of the world that interests me. And also, it helps if it's a context that I find interesting.

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

I'm just trying to understand what's around me as much as anyone else is, really. To draw a bead on a moving target.

The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.