Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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

I go too fast to see much, only the tops of everything. I've got to prowl slow some time through this country.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

I don't really take a step back too often to see what's going on.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Wisdom begins at the end.

If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.

We must look a long time before we can see.

I'm the kind of person where I always digest everything around me.

Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.

The price of seeing is silence.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

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.

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

It's crazy what you see if you aren't really looking.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again?