Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

You don't really get the full grasp of something until you see it for yourself.

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

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

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.

But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge.

The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

I don't believe in reading. I don't care about reading. It means nothing to me. I believe that by using your eyes and ears, you'll find everything that there is, and you don't have to read about it.

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

I have learnt an enormous amount from talking to people on the ground.

There's a lot of things you can't learn unless you actually experience it.

All I know is what I've lived through, so this is what I know.

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

The artist may rightly venture the opinion that he does not convey ideas, does not preach, nor that he intents to convert people by using mass communication techniques.. .Better than handing out all kinds of wise advice, he could show life itself; he could awake forces lying dormant in everybody, he could launch an invitation to create direct and personal experiences.

All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

Many people think they cannot have knowledge or understanding of God without reading books. But hearing is better than reading, and seeing is better than hearing. Hearing about Benares is different from reading about it; but seeing Benares is different from either hearing or reading.

The only way to know something absolutely is to experience it for yourself; anything less is theory, speculation, and belief. .

Knowledge, like religion, must be experienced in order to be known.

Life is too short to learn everything by personal experience.

Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.