J. Donald Walters Quotes

My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

A struggle, to the person experiencing it, is a struggle.

Everybody is determined by his own experience.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

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

Even the most time-honoured truths do not have to be accepted until they are your truths.

We're all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories - and that's the only way we can experience the world.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that, you have lost everything.

We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.

Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.

Well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer...it's incommunicable.

What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies with that which is here set forth.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

The facts of another's life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life. Only the feeling that made the days can light them.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

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

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.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

No one really understands the grief or joy of another.

It doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't. What matters is which experience a person has.

My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you see it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!

Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.