“A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labour of the bees, will often be stung for his curiosity.”

Statement to a reporter a few months before he died, as quoted at Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/bellinvent.html

"Speech to Danish working-class actors on the art of observation" [Rede an dänische Arbeiterschauspieler über die Kunst der Beobachtung] (1934), from The Messingkauf Poems, published in Versuche 14 (1955); trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, pp. 235-236
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

observes it
Source: 1980s, Notes on an epistemology for living things, 1981, p.258

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Introduction, p. xix

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Quatrains, Nature
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: Les Miserables

Variant: The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

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