Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I believe that the best way to help people understand the world is to provide them with opportunities to actively explore, experiment, and express themselves.

If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

I need more raw experience. I've read and watched a lot of things, but I haven't done a lot of things.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.

Information can be passed from one to another, like a silver dollar. There's absolutely no wisdom except what you learn for yourself.

Experience is the only teacher we have. We may talk and reason all our lives, but we shall not understand a word of truth until we experience it ourselves.

What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

Experience is stronger than belief. Once we have experiences our mind begins to open. This works better than me forcing my own experience or knowledge onto anyone. Show them how to have their own experiences.

One has to taste an experience for oneself and find out if the thing is genuine or helpful. Then, before discarding something, one has to go further, so that one gets firsthand experience.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Though we may be learned by another's knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.

she considered the possibility of telling her about everything that was happening, but then she changed her mind; people never learn anything by being told; they have to find out for themselves.

The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.

You'll learn more about a road by traveling it than by consulting all the maps in the world.

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

Wounds make better lessons than lectures.

When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.

I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

Train yourselves. Don't wait to be fed knowledge out of a book. Get out and seek it. Make explorations. Do your own research work. Train your hands and your mind. Become curious. Invent your own problems and solve them. You can see things going on all about you. Inquire into them. Seek out answers to your own questions. There are many phenomena going on in nature the explanation of which cannot be found in books. Find out why these phenomena take place. Information a boy gets by himself is enormously more valuable than that which is taught to him in school.

I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter. But I think it's very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.