"No method nor discipline can supersede the..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
More by Henry David Thoreau
“Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived.”
“The inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two fires,--the soldiery and the priesthood.”
“The fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that theyare thieves.”
More on Observation
“The very dogs were all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer's shop, forgot their wings and briskness, and baked to death in dusty corners of the window.”
“Everywhere I go I smell fresh paint.”
“For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.”
More on Learning
“Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.”
“However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.”
“I never failed. It just didn't work 10,000 times.”