Marquis de Sade Quotes

All our knowledge begins with the senses...

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses. ... Galileo and Hume first upheld this principle with full clarity and decisiveness.

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.

Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

Experience alone can decide on truth.

Judgment is forced upon us by experience

Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?

There is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses.

We need only reflect on what has been prov'd at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that 'tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.

The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

All inferences from experience... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

We may give advice, but not the sense to use it.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

The way you see life will largely determine what you get out of it.

The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.

Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.

Until you've tasted it [anything], you can't really know it.