Source: The Last Book in the Universe
“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.”
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes

Variant: You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go.
Source: Oh, The Places You'll Go!

“Paradise
Is exactly like
Where you are right now
Only much much
Better.”
"Language is a Virus (from Outer Space)", opening lines; the song title itself is a quote of William S. Burroughs.
United States Live (1984)
As quoted in Loose Cannons: Devastating Dish from the World's Wildest Women (1998) by Autumn Stephens, p. 270
““You split hairs.”
“Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.””
Source: Eifelheim (2006), Chapter XXV (p. 447)

“But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.”
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: "Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but—"
And I was struck by the graphic image:
"But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity."
And suddenly that tranquil cloud-world, that world so harmless and simple that one sees below on rising out of the clouds, took on in my eyes a new quality. That peaceful world became a pitfall. I imagined the immense white pitfall spread beneath me. Below it reigned not what one might think — not the agitation of men, not the living tumult and bustle of cities, but a silence even more absolute than in the clouds, a peace even more final. This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft. Mountaineers too know the sea of clouds, yet it does not seem to them the fabulous curtain it is to me.