Andre Gide Quotes

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

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

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

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness forces them to do so...because we learn what to perceive.

The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.

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.

All our knowledge begins with the senses...

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

The true man of science - will smell, taste, see, hear better than other men.

Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.

Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

If I, deaf, blind, find life rich and interesting, how much more can you gain by the use of your five senses!

Use all of your senses.

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

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.

Feel the world, instead of trying to understand the world.