To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.
I have often thought that however learned you may talk about it, one knows nothing but what he learns from his own experience. [Ger., Da dacht ich oft: schwatzt noch so hoch gelehrt, Man weiss doch nichts, als was man selbst erfahrt.]
A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts.
To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses.
First-hand acquaintance with the actual texts is always the best way.
The only way to know something absolutely is to experience it for yourself; anything less is theory, speculation, and belief. .
It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.
All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.
I will not write about anyplace in the world unless I've been there to personally research it.
I think the best research is people you meet and things that they say, rather than second hand accounts of something. I think when you meet someone and talk to them, then you get the real thing and that's what you can use. That's the material you can actually put on the page.
My own personal experience has become more first-hand.
Trust one who has gone through it.
Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that, you have lost everything.
We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.
One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.
