"He who is only a traveler learns..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”
“Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.”
“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”
More on Experience
“People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.”
“The world is not in your books and maps, it's out there.”
“It is easier for a man to be thought fit for an employment that he has not, than for one he stands already possessed of, and is exercising.”
More on Knowledge
“The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.”
“You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.”
“The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have not legitimacy.”