Thomas Carlyle Quotes

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

There is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

Philosophy and theology have so much to tell us about God, but people today want to experience God. There is a difference between eating dinner and merely reading the menu.

Young children are naturally so philosophical. They ask: 'What is real? What is truth?' They have to learn it; they don't automatically know it. To them, it's a game. You can study this for years in college, and yet you probably asked it when you were four or five years old.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.

If your education is not enough, experience will teach you lessons.

Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.

Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.

Experience by itself teaches nothing.

Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.

What is it to be a philosopher? Is it not to be prepared against events?

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.

Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.

There's nothing that can teach you more than experience.