“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, July 2, 1857
But as Austin Kleon notes: What you do determines what kind of attention you pay to the world. What kind of attention you pay to the world determines what you find in it.
“The question is not what you look at,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “but what you see.”
