Top 100 Direct Experience Quotes
#1. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.
Richard P. Feynman
#2. No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.
John Fowles
#3. Don't ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind. Direct experience is the only valid confirmation.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#4. The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.
Carl Sagan
#5. Of course the thinking mind must sooner or later be controlled, developed, and supplied with the force of will for a break-through to non-thinking, a direct experience of non-duality. But at what stage?
Christmas Humphreys
#6. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
#7. Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
Fernando Pessoa
#8. I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#9. The more perfect our means of direct experience, the more easily we are caught by the dangerous illusion that perceiving is tantamount to knowing and understanding.
Rudolf Arnheim
#10. When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection.
Peter Hans Kolvenbach
#11. In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience
Albert Bandura
#12. Genuine faith is living knowledge, exact cognition, direct experience. For many centuries faith and belief have been confused, and now it takes great effort and exertion to make people understand that faith is true knowledge and not futile beliefs.
Samael Aun Weor
#14. If we are to reach certainty and true autonomy of realization, we need to be willing to be heretics. What's more, we need to become universal heretics, not believing anything that we do not know from direct experience, beyond stories, beyond hearsay, and even beyond the mind.
A.H. Almaas
#15. People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.
Junot Diaz
#17. Spirituality is natural, personal, and rooted in direct experience. There is no such thing as secondhand spirituality. No one else's spirituality can serve as substitute for your own.
David Cowan
#18. Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.
Rudolf Carnap
#19. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
Mao Zedong
#20. Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.
Pema Chodron
#21. Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.
Michael Crichton
#22. Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
A.R. Ammons
#23. The visual impact of the stupa on the observer brings a direct experience of inherent wakefulness and dignity. Stupas continue to be built because of their ability to liberate one simply upon seeing their structure
Chogyam Trungpa
#24. Only after Self-Realisation and only then, is there a direct experience of the Spirit. It then manifests its powers in the human personality, and it's light enlightens the consciousness into a new awareness. The Divine intelligence of the Spirit radiates on all sides.
Nirmala Srivastava
#25. We are so numb we don't even know what a direct experience is. We have an experience, then we think about it and we think the thinking about it is the experience.
Stephen Levine
#26. In daily terms, the work of listening is to be constantly worn free of our preconceptions and preferences so that nothing stands in the way of our direct experience of life.
Mark Nepo
#27. Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
Michael Ignatieff
#28. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
Oliver Sacks
#29. Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.
C.S. Lewis
#30. I believe that my father had some kind of direct experience of the spiritual nature of reality, maybe a vision, that he tried to convey perhaps unconsciously in his work- that there is a different, more loving and transcendent reality beyond this world of imagined conflicts.
Lisa Henson
#31. He saw that the key to liberation would be to break through ignorance and to enter deeply into the heart of reality and attain a direct experience of it. Such knowledge would not be the knowledge of the intellect, but of direct experience.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#32. It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.
Roger Penrose
#33. To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.
Mark Epstein
#34. How soon will you realize that the only thing you don't have is the direct experience that there's nothing you need that you don't have?
Ken Keyes Jr.
#35. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
Carl Andre
#36. Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.
Michael Pollan
#37. We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.
Terry Tempest Williams
#38. I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.
Justin Cronin
#39. To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self.
Ansel Adams
#40. They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.
Marsden Hartley
#41. If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we an dispense with the masters.
Henry Miller
#42. When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
Daniel Bell
#43. Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.
Elliot Perlman
#44. 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.
Robert Dallek
#45. I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.
Derrick Jensen
#46. Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.
Sharon Salzberg
#47. caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#48. One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.
C. G. Jung
#49. I had a direct experience of the efficacy of this form of mind-body medicine. This comes from somebody who had been sort of an alpha male, highly cynical war correspondent, who had basically seen it all and heard it all, was cynical and trusted nothing.
Brad Willis
#50. A teacher will alter the balance of power by actually lifting a person into other states of mind. In those states of mind the teaching will take place in non-verbal ways through direct experience.
Frederick Lenz
#51. I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.
Richard K. Morgan
#52. Understanding is the one-dimensional comprehension of the intellect. It leads to knowledge. Realization is three-dimensional - a simultaneous comprehension of head, heart, and instinct. It comes only from direct experience.
Dan Millman
#53. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
Malcolm Gladwell
#54. Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.
James Cameron
#55. Students engaged in direct experience with materials, unforeseen obstacles, and serendipitous discoveries may result in understanding never anticipated by the teacher.
Sylvia Libow Martinez
#56. I do not think direct experience is always necessary to act, but I believe that sometimes you have to have had the real experience to act certain roles. One of those was losing your family member. I was not being able to imagine how sad that could be.
Go Ah-sung
#57. Pure love is who you are! When you express pure love, you give yourself the direct experience of who you are. It is the greatest gift! It looks as if your giving a gift to others, and you are giving it to yourself, that is because there is no one else in the room, it only looks as if there is.
Neale Donald Walsch
#58. Authentic faith is lived wisdom, exact cognition, direct experience.
Samael Aun Weor
#59. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself - and from each other.
Robert M. Pirsig
#60. It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unifying features of a complex of phenomena which present themselves as quite unconnected to the direct experience of the senses.
Albert Einstein
#61. Only direct experience of the peaceful internal state will remove doubt and provide enlightenment - not in a spooky, out-of-this-world kind of way, but in a rational, let's-turn-on-the-lights sort of way.
Gudjon Bergmann
#62. Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.
E. M. Forster
#63. Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#64. Zen values the simple, concrete, living facts of everyday direct personal experience.
James H. Austin
#65. Today the major reason for our interest in Flatland is that for the first time we can achieve some of the dreams of our ancestors a century ago and obtain direct visual experience of phenomena in a dimension higher than our own.
Thomas Banchoff
#66. I love the experience of getting to direct because I can have all of the fun of helping shape the show, but I don't have to actually do it, so I don't have to deal with the nerves.
Tom Lenk
#67. When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience.
Shekhar Kapur
#68. It is evident from the state of the country, from the habits of the people, from the experience we have had on the point itself, that it is impracticable to raise any very considerable sums by direct taxation.
Alexander Hamilton
#69. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility.
Matthew B. Crawford
#70. The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
Thomas Merton
#71. I think this is an exciting time to be a female filmmaker. Trust your instincts, work harder than anyone else and learn your craft. Know it all. This means learn how to shoot, edit, produce and direct. Get as much experience as you can and watch a lot of films.
Alex Hammond
#72. I love directing, It means so much to me to direct stories about subject matter that I care deeply about. I can act in many things, and you can try to experience different characters, but to direct is years of your life and you have to really love it and believe in it.
Angelina Jolie
#73. In its complexity and sensuality, nature invites exploration, direct contact, and experience. But it also inspires a sense of awe, a glimpse of what is still "un-Googleable" ... life's mystery and magnitude.
Kim John Payne
#74. Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience ...
Dean Koontz
#75. There is a direct relationship between our personal experience with the Lord and how we see ourselves. The closer we grow to him, the more clear and complete becomes our vision of who we are, who we have always been, and who we may become.
Sheri Dew
#76. My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
Lee Daniels
#77. I have never directed anything for the stage. I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#78. The depth of learning is in direct relation to the intensity of the experience.
Robert Monroe
#79. The seventeenth century witnessed the birth of modern science as we know it today. This science was something new, based on a direct confrontation of nature by experiment and observation. But there was another feature of the new science-a dependence on numbers, on real numbers of actual experience.
I. Bernard Cohen
#80. Consciousness is in this present moment, the awareness with every cell in your body the direct and experience of love.
Matthew Donnelly
#81. Children understand and remember concepts best when they learn from direct personal experience.
Joseph Cornell
#82. Yeah, the whole 'One Tree Hill' experience made me realize I wanna write, and produce, and direct as well as act. I'm interested in all facets of the industry.
Ashley Rickards
#83. In my experience of these things, parties which shout about dirty tricks and the like tend to do so because they fear a direct hit in some vulnerable part of their political anatomy.
Peter Mandelson
#84. It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#85. I definitely want to direct. This is just another learning experience for me, to get a chance to hear the questions and concerns the directors have, some of their fears. It's a team sport. You have to give everybody what they need so they are able to perform at their best.
Michael B. Jordan
#86. You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.
Charlie Munger
#87. I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn't go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct.
Charlie Hunnam
#88. The Church is the safe place to be. I can safely believe everything the Church teaches. It will not harm me, and in fact it will equip me to grow and grow and have a better and better ability to experience that direct presence.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
#89. The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves ...
Peter Drucker
#90. Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#91. Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.
Matt Ridley
#92. A person with a mind is bound to be filled with conceptions. These conceptions prevent him from knowing things directly, so a person with a mind shall never really know.
Liezi
#93. [At Microsoft] I had many years of experience and history and seeing connections. With my direct reports, the job at Microsoft was to delegate and then be able to properly review, but not to micromanage. To have a way of connecting and integrating without getting in the way.
Steve Ballmer
#94. Art becomes a spiritual process depending upon the degree of commitment that you bring to it. Every experience becomes direct food for your art. Then your art teaches you about life.
Nick Bantock
#95. The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.
Ayana Mathis
#96. Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way - a first-order, first-person experience - rather than filtered through the mind of another.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#97. I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.
Alistair Cross
#98. She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.
Sylvia Plath
#99. I will direct one day. I need some more life experience before I feel like I can do something like that comfortably. It'd be a feature, it'd be something maybe that I had in writing as well.
Stana Katic
#100. Most of my job life has had to do with welfare, first helping people find work and then as an administrator. The earlier experience was more direct and satisfying, and I enjoy thinking that a bunch of people somewhere are doing better today than they might have done if not for me.
Gail Carson Levine
