Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.
No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
What is time? If I am not asked, I know; if I am asked, I don't.
Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.
I'm somebody who has to physically experience an environment in order to know it as well as I would like to know it. I recognize this is impressionistic, not scientific. People say, 'You sound like Walt Whitman.' Well, I'll take that comparison.
All I know is what I've lived through, so this is what I know.
I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.
Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.
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.
Love can be understood only 'from the inside,' as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.
The knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the knowledge of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is objective - defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined... and fed into a process, now called decision-making. This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.
We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.
Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
If you want to understand what a watermelon is, you take a watermelon, get a knife, and cut the watermelon. Then you put a slice in your mouth. Boom! YOUR experience!
Trust nothing but your own experience.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.
No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
In the wider context, what I believe I was - the point I was making was that our life experiences do permit us to see some facts and understand them more easily than others.
People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'
