Chogyam Trungpa Quotes

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.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

Working through experience is best for me, just being there and trying to get into the mode.

I've heard people have written books of me. People don't even know me, but they've written a book on me. You ever heard of hearing it from the horse's mouth? I'm the horse.

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

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

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

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

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

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

I don't care how smart a kid you are. The only way you learn what's not right is from experience.

The truth is lived, not taught.

You can learn so much just by doing, not by listening to anybody.

The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experience, seeing something with our own eyes.

I need more raw experience. I've read and watched a lot of things, but I haven't done a lot of things.

I think that we're all, as human beings, so limited. If we want to write about ourselves, that's fairly easy. And if we write about our friends or our families, we can do that. But if we want to project ourselves somewhere beyond our personal experience, we're going to fail unless we get that experience or we borrow it from others.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

But it's a journey and the sad thing is you only learn from experience, so as much as someone can tell you things, you have to go out there and make your own mistakes in order to learn.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

I know America's great not because I read about it in a book but because I've seen it with my own eyes.