"If you are describing any occurrence... make..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“I delight to come to my bearings,... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sitthoughtfully while it goes by.”
“How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.”
“A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.”
More on Perception
“Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.”
“I don't like to say something's weird when it's innovative and fresh.”
“I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”
More on Observation
“The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.”
“A brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and never in it.”
“There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who cannot.”