Direct Experience Quotes

Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.

I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't.

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

Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.

If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

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

The best preparation for work is not thinking about work, talking about work or studying for work. It is work.

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.

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

I'm a believer that players are good self-directors, and I think one thing that's good about video games is they can direct their own experience.

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

The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.

He who tastes not, knows not.

One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message.

I find it best to dive right in and learn the hard way.

Just as there is no substitute for original works of art, there is no substitute for the world of direct sensual experience.

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

I never really did a western western.

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

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don't fight war on our soil, we don't have direct experience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give to it.

I don't believe in selling art by transparencies. Art is a firsthand 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.