Derrick Jensen Quotes

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

The brain builds a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us. So I can say with some certainty, 'I think therefore I am.' But I cannot say, 'You think therefore you are,' because you are within my perceptual bubble.

It's sad to me that the main stage of history is a story of how we became this visually obsessed, extremely narcissistic, extremely concerned about image, culture. At least in the West.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

There's wisdom in wine.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.

What you experience as "reality," including your physical body and aging, is shaped by your habits of perception.

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.

All we have is the story we tell.

Everyone's entitled to their own experience.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

Italy is not a country for beginners.

Travel is the ultimate inspiration.

I always feel like there are specific things about Houston. There's one museum in particular in Houston. So many of the things that I'm interested in now I can sort of trace back to that museum, which introduced me to them.

Everyone has been a witness sometime - It doesn't change it if you don't believe.

Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.

You can accept it that it may be true what somebody else says, but until you have experienced it, it is not dynamic to your own awareness.

Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.

You can tell how much fun a city is going to be if Nobu is in it.

Not sense data or atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience.