Hermann Hesse Quotes

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting... Thus a man of knowledge sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like an ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under his control.

It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.

The truth is lived, not taught.

It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

A learned person will become noble only when he or she has put into real practice what has been learned, instead of mere words.

I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.

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.

Only ... from personal experience [can a man] take the necessary measures without a preliminary process of trial and error.

Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.

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

All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience.

When it comes time to teach, teach from your experience. Go out and do, learn from the doing, then teach from the knowing.

Education is cheap; experience is expensive.

You can't write about things without doing them. You just have to live that same way.

I believe that we learn by practice... it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit.

.. since it was true that study, even when done properly, can only teach us what wisdom, right conduct and determination consist in, they wanted to put their children directly in touch with actual cases, teaching them not by hearsay but by actively assaying them, vigorously molding and forming them not merely by word and precept but chiefly by deeds and examples, so that wisdom should not be something which the soul knows but the soul's very essence and temperament, not something acquired but a natural property.

Religion is a practical discipline and in the 17th century in the West, we turned it onto a head trip. But it's like dancing, or swimming, or driving, which you can't learn by texts. You have to get into the car and learn how to manipulate the vehicle.

The best lessons, the best sermons are those that are lived.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is arealist, and converses with things.

Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.

What the head thinks, should be examined critically in the heart and this right decision should be carried out by the hands. This should be the primary product of the educational process.