
“By far the best proof is experience.”
Aphorism 70
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
“By far the best proof is experience.”
“Sex without love is an empty experience. But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.”
Love and Death (1975)
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”
Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
A Second Outline in Portraiture (1936), as quoted in Marsden Hartley, Gail R. Scott - Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York, p. 167
1930s
Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)
Context: The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than... the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.
“It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience.”
Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 4 : Creativity and the Encounter, p. 91
Context: Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur so well states. It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience.
“Failure isn’t the best teacher. Neither is experience. Only evaluated experience teaches us.”
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)
“There was a looseness to this, beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well.”
Source: Jackpot trilogy, Agency (2020), Chapter 3, "App Whisperer" (Verity reflecting on Eunice's conversational style)