“Let us… take in our hands the staff of experience… To be blind and to think that one can do without this staff is the worst kind of blindness.”
Man a Machine (1747), p. 89
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Julien Offray de La Mettrie 42
French physician and philosopher 1709–1751Related quotes
“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”
This is declared to be "an old Kantian maxim" in General Systems Vol. 7-8 (1962), p. 11, by the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, but may simply be a paraphrase or summation of Kantian ideas.
Kant's treatment of the transcendental logic in the First Critique contains a portion, of which this quote may be an ambiguously worded paraphrase. Kant, claiming that both reason and the senses are essential to the formation of our understanding of the world, writes: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind (A51/B75)".
Disputed
“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Source: Quotes from Thorns in The desert, P. 10.
Cows and armed guards on a college campus. Where is the truth amid all this subterfuge? http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles204.htm, April 2, 2003
2003
As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1993)
“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Unsourced in The Philosophy of Mark Twain: The Wit and Wisdom of a Literary Genius (2014) by David Graham
Disputed
Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
The Gold at the Starbow’s End (p. 381)
Platinum Pohl (2005)