Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

I don't think you can judge something without seeing it.

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

It's the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

I’ve never found the truth to be fair and balanced.

Man is a recording animal.

Objectivity in the end is an unattainable ideal.

How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly.

The good journalist is never objective. He is always neutral.

The benefit of hindsight is we only really talk about those things that did work out.

There's a lot to be learned by watching. I think the younger generation could fare a lot better in their game if they could sit down and watch some of the games of the past.

There's a Yoruba proverb which roughly translates into, 'What turns its face to one person has turned its back on the other.' It's always made me think about how deeply subjective our experience of the world can be.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

Experience by itself teaches nothing.

You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

We see only that which we are.

there are some people who never learn; indeed, few people learn by experience, so far as I have ever seen.

Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.

Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.