indirect experience Quotes

Interesting things did seem to happen, but always to somebody else.

I only know what I read in the papers.

His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.

The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

Ugliness and evil are necessary for growth but they may be experienced vicariously.

Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.

For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience ... indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.

Vicarious living is only slightly less impossible than vicarious eating.

There is no such thing as vicarious experience.

If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.

Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others

A person could see a lot without ever leaving his own living room. Especially if he had the right tools.

It will sound quite weird but I actually watch TLC as I love to travel. It's like sitting in your drawing room and traveling to a new world.

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.

Direct experience is inherently too limited to form an adequate foundation either for theory or for application. At the best it produces an atmosphere that is of value in drying and hardening the structure of thought. The greater value of indirect experience lies in its greater variety and extent. History is universal experience, the experience not of another, but of many others under manifold conditions.

It is a sad thing to look at happiness only through another's eyes.

I'm really not a fan of letting the audience live vicariously through stuff.

Without stepping out the door, you can know the world.