Theme

Philosophy quotes about experience

Experience is the lived encounter with world and self—foundation or limit for knowledge, art, and ethics.

Why this theme matters

Empiricists treat experience as the source of ideas; phenomenologists describe its structure; pragmatists treat it as experimental and revisable.

In the history of philosophy

From Aristotelian aisthesis to Locke, Hume, Dewey, and phenomenology, experience is a battleground for epistemology and metaphysics.

Thinkers in this collection

John Locke , George Berkeley , David Hume , William James , John Dewey , Alfred North Whitehead , Nishida Kitaro , Al-Ghazali

Frequently asked questions

What is experience in philosophy?

It is the first-person undergoing of sensations, thoughts, and situations—interpreted differently across schools.

Is all knowledge from experience?

Empiricists lean yes; rationalists and others defend a priori elements or innate structures.

Where are philosophy quotes about experience?

This page gathers English passages on perception, habit, and lived life.

  1. Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.
  2. Their being is to be perceived.
  3. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other.
  4. Consciousness…does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…It is nothing jointed; it flows.
  5. Experience is not a veil that shuts man off from nature; it is a means of penetrating continually further into the heart of nature.
  6. In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.
  7. Pure experience is the state of experience just as it is, without the slightest addition of deliberative discrimination.
  8. To experience means to know facts just as they are.
  9. Certainty is not attained by imitation, but by tasting (direct experience).
  10. We feel and know by experience that we are eternal.
  11. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters.
  12. Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.
  13. Before you looked at this flower, it and your mind alike were still; when you come to look, its colors suddenly become clear.
  14. Pure experience is identical with direct experience.
  15. Sense-data are not a secure foundation; the eye sees the star as small, yet demonstration shows it larger than the earth.
  16. Emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic.
  17. The African does not stand outside reality but enters into communion with it; knowledge is participation, not only analysis.
  18. Sensation does not belong to the mind; living and sensing belong to the organic body.
  19. Perception is free from conceptual construction.
    Dignaga
    Indian Classical Philosophy
  20. It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination.
  21. That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow.
  22. Ci poetry takes jingjie — the aesthetic realm — as its highest: with jingjie it naturally attains a lofty style and famous lines of its own.
  23. Jingjie is not a matter of scenery alone: joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness are also realms of the human heart. Whoever can write true scenery and true feeling may be said to have jingjie.