Edmund Husserl Quotes

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

Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.

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

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.

It is the theory which decides what we can observe

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

Men trust their eyes rather than their ears; the road by precept is long and tedious, by example short and effectual.

In one word, to draw the rule from experience, one must generalize; this is a necessity that imposes itself on the most circumspect observer.

Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.

The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them.

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.

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.

I believe that one thinks much more soundly if the thoughts arise from direct contact with things, than if one looks at things with the aim of finding this or that in them.

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts.