Firsthand 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.

But now that I'm cartooning full-time, I'm more of an observer. I'm talking to people who are experiencing these things. But it's not like being in the trenches.

I have been to Iraq on a number of occasions. I was with the first group that went in.

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

All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.

What could be any more correct for any people than to see with their own eyes?

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

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

I have been privileged to be briefed and to know that we have been visited [by aliens]. I do not have first hand experience in this regard, but I have been on investigating teams and I have been briefed by insiders who do know.

You'll learn more about a road by traveling it than by consulting all the maps in the world.

You can't exactly do it from your hotel room. It's the weather; you've got to get out in it. You're telling people that there are 70 mile-per-hour winds. So it's like, 'Let's prove it.'

Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.

It is one thing to read about the world, but quite another to see and hear for oneself.

Things seen are mightier than things heard.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

You could imagine writing about a prostitute, for instance, but if you haven't spent time with prostitutes then you're going to get all these details wrong. But if you have a lot of sex with prostitutes and you're friends with prostitutes and you interview prostitutes, then maybe after many, many years you might be able to create prostitute characters.

I genuinely don't know Julian Assange well. To authenticate an opinion, I really would have to meet him.

You must see first before you can believe.

When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit--a twenty-second best.

The only way to know something absolutely is to experience it for yourself; anything less is theory, speculation, and belief. .

At my last job in the tech world, we'd throttle our wi-fi to experience what download speeds might be like for someone in the developing world. It was our attempt to experience it first hand. I thought it was a bit ridiculous because, no matter what we did, we wouldn't be able to fully experience their world unless we were living it every day.

To be able to research directly from firefighters makes all the difference in the world in the authenticity of a performance.

Now I get exposure first with people directly in the clubs. This is a unique situation for me.