Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.

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.

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

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

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.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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

The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.

All things are known to the soul.

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.

Learning comes from education, while knowing comes from revelation. Learning is cognitive, while knowing is spiritual.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

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.

Life is too short to learn everything by personal experience.

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.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.

My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

One who ”knows,” knows there is no need to discourse; knowing is enough

They proved to me by convincing reasons that God does not exist; Afterwards I saw God, for he came and embraced me. And now what am I to believe- the reasoning of others or my own experience? Truth is what the soul has seen and experienced; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.

The way of heaven can be known and experienced through the heart.

You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.

I believe in order that I may understand.

If you don’t know God as beautiful and satisfying, you don’t know him.