Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I think people get fixated on the example of an idea.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

The eyes see not what is before them when the mind is intent on other matters.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it's more available to you.

The human animal only sees what it wants to see.

To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.

Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more people know,--the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation,--the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

Our life experiences area result of where our attention takes us.

I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily.

Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.

We always have a tendency to see those things that do not exist and to be blind to the great lessons that are right there before our eyes.

The person with a fixed goal, a clear picture of his desire, or an ideal always before him, causes it, through repetition, to be buried deeply in his subconscious mind and is thus enabled, thanks to its generative and sustaining power, to realize his goal in a minimum of time and with a minimum of physical effort. Just pursue the thought unceasingly. Step by step you will achieve realization, for all your faculties and powers become directed to that end

Each obsession is a knot in your being. Once it is opened, great energy is released