Empirical Knowledge Quotes

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

We need only reflect on what has been prov'd at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that 'tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.

If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much what as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.

But isn't the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around - walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of thing.

Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

Men trust their eyes rather than their ears; the road by precept is long and tedious, by example short and effectual.

Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

It is true that the grasping of truth is not possible without empirical basis. However, the deeper we penetrate and the more extensive and embracing our theories become the less empirical knowledge is needed to determine those theories.

Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.

Where there is truth, there also is knowledge which is true.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

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

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.