Quotes about experiment
page 37

Adolf A. Berle photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Clive Barker photo

“I've held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Gigaplex's interview, 1995

Mark Hopkins (educator) photo
Madhuri Dixit photo
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi photo

“The principle of TM is simple, being is bliss in its nature, infinite happiness, mind is always moving in the direction of greater happiness. It is the experience of everyone: wherever the mind goes, it goes in the direction of greater happiness.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

Quoted from: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - Lake Louise, Canada (1968) - MaharishiUniversity http://www.bienfaits-meditation.com/en/maharishi/videos/mechanics-of-the-technique

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo
Edward Hopper photo
John Calvin photo
Roberto Durán photo

“My experience won this fight…. I knew I was in control. I was not scared. He was not hitting me with anything that was hurting me.”

Roberto Durán (1951) Panamanian boxer

On his fight with P. J. Goosen on 12 August, 2000 http://www.cmgworldwide.com/sports/duran/quotes.html

Anthony Burgess photo
Thomas Young (scientist) photo
Vikram Sarabhai photo

“No great importance is to be given to mere experience.”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

In Vikram A. Sarabhai, 19 August 2002, 14 December 2013, OutlookIndia http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?216858,

“For experience teacheth me that straight trees have crooked roots.”

P. 311 http://books.google.com/books?id=3xRbAAAAMAAJ&q="for+experience+teacheth+me+that+straight+trees+have+crooked+roots"&pg=PA311#v=onepage
Euphues and his England

Thomas Robert Malthus photo

“It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter I, paragraph 9, lines 1-2

George Holmes Howison photo
Vannevar Bush photo
Northrop Frye photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Ursula Goodenough photo
N. R. Narayana Murthy photo
Edwin Abbott Abbott photo

“For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between them.Constantly carrying out their policy of making Configuration the leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents; with us — next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal homage — a man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if not, his Son. By "honour", however, is by no means meant "indulgence", but a reverent regard for their highest interests: and the Circles teach that the duty of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to those of posterity, thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as well as that of their own immediate descendants.”

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

Susan Sontag photo
Peter Jennings photo
Dana Gioia photo
Aldous Huxley photo

““What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 19-20
Source: The Doors of Perception (1954)

Marsden Hartley photo
Tom Brady photo
John Desmond Bernal photo
John Gray photo
George W. Bush photo

“Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Radio Address (June 3, 2006); quoted in "Bush, senators renew fight against gay marriage" at CNN.com (June 5, 2006) http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/05/same.sex.marriage.ap/index.html
2000s, 2006

David Morrison photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“I need to take a break from this life as a human for 45 minutes and go experience a little bit of immortality.”

D.M. Turner (1962–1996) American drug researcher

Interview with Elizabeth Gips http://www.tripzine.com/articles.asp?id=dmturnergips

Paz de la Huerta photo
Eric Hobsbawm photo
Charles Stross photo
Warren Farrell photo
John Hirst photo
David Hume photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
Terry Eagleton photo

“At the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. II

“The rule is derived inductively from experience, therefore does not have any inner necessity, is always valid only for special cases and can anytime be refuted by opposite facts. On the contrary, the law is a logical relation between conceptual constructions; it is therefore deductible from upper [übergeordnete] laws and enables the derivation of lower laws; it has as such a logical necessity in concordance with its upper premises; it is not a mere statement of probability, but has a compelling, apodictic logical value once its premises are accepted”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1920s, Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (1928, 1933), p. 91; as cited in: M. Drack, W. Apfalter, D. Pouvreau (2007) " On the making of a system theory of life: Paul A Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's conceptual connection http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874664/". in: Q Rev Biol. 2007 December; 82(4): 349–373.

Bertolt Brecht photo

“Play your part creatively in all the struggles
Of men of your time, thereby
Helping, with the seriousness of study and the cheerfulness of knowledge
To turn the struggle into common experience and
Justice into a passion.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Speech to Danish working-class actors on the art of observation" [Rede an dänische Arbeiterschauspieler über die Kunst der Beobachtung] (1934), from The Messingkauf Poems, published in Versuche 14 (1955); trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 238
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“I am far from wishing to treat lightly or inconsiderately the evils attendant upon a standing army. The history of those countries where standing armies have been allowed to usurp an ascendancy over the civil authorities, is a volume pregnant with instruction to every one. We may look at France, for instance, and derive a lesson of eternal importance. But when it is said, that in ancient Rome twelve thousand praetorian bands were potent enough to dispose of that empire according to their will and pleasure, it should be remembered that that was the result of a number of pre-disposing causes, which have no existence in England. Before the civil constitution of any country can be overturned by a standing army, the people of that country must be lamentably degenerate; they must be debased and enervated by all the worst excesses of an arbitrary and despotic government; their martial spirit must be extinguished; they must be brought to a state of political degradation, I may almost say of political emasculation, such as few countries experience that have once known the blessings of liberty.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (8 March 1816), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 12.
1810s

David Hume photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo
William C. Davis photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“[…] You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience.”

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) English author and academic

Page 352-353.
Stepping Westward (1965)

Phil McGraw photo

“You create your own experience.”

Phil McGraw (1950) American television host, psychologist, actor and film producer
Mohammad Khatami photo
George William Curtis photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo

“Experience rarely teaches its lessons directly but instead requires interpretation through the filter of preconceived theories, prejudices, and desires. Where these are invincible, facts are weak things.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Less Liberté Means Less Egalité http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_sndgs05.html (Winter 2006).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Richard Dawkins photo
S. I. Hayakawa photo
Vilém Flusser photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
David Chalmers photo
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes photo
John Polkinghorne photo

“Let me end this chapter by suggesting that religion has done something for science. The latter came to full flower in its modern form in seventeenth-century Europe. Have you ever wondered why that's so? After all the ancient Greeks were pretty clever and the Chinese achieved a sophisticated culture well before we Europeans did, yet they did not hit on science as we now understand it. Quite a lot of people have thought that the missing ingredient was provided by the Christian religion. Of course, it's impossible to prove that so - we can't rerun history without Christianity and see what happens - but there's a respectable case worth considering. It runs like this.
The way Christians think about creation (and the same is true for Jews and Muslims) has four significant consequences. The first is that we expect the world to be orderly because its Creator is rational and consistent, yet God is also free to create a universe whichever way God chooses. Therefore, we can't figure it out just by thinking what the order of nature ought to be; we'll have to take a look and see. In other words, observation and experiment are indispensable. That's the bit the Greeks missed. They thought you could do it all just by cogitating. Third, because the world is God's creation, it's worthy of study. That, perhaps, was a point that the Chinese missed as they concentrated their attention on the world of humanity at the expense of the world of nature. Fourth, because the creation is not itself divine, we can prod it and investigate it without impiety. Put all these features together, and you have the intellectual setting in which science can get going.
It's certainly a historical fact that most of the pioneers of modern science were religious men. They may have had their difficulties with the Church (like Galileo) or been of an orthodox cast of mind (like Newton), but religion was important for them. They used to like to say that God had written two books for our instruction, the book of scripture and the book of nature. I think we need to try to decipher both books if we're to understand what's really happening.”

John Polkinghorne (1930) physicist and priest

page 29-30.
Quarks, Chaos & Christianity (1995)

Noam Elkies photo

“One does not have to have experience raising children through school, dealing with family tragedies, and so forth, to be able to find three numbers whose fourth powers add up to another one.”

Noam Elkies (1966) American mathematician

Are Mathematicians Past Their Prime at 35? http://www.massey.ac.nz/~rmclachl/overthehill.html

Ayumi Hamasaki photo

“Isn't it? It's as if we have just entered a new age
It's a miracle;
we will never experience it again
Let's remember it once more”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Evolution
Lyrics, I am...

“By becoming poor and entrusting divine revelation to a carpenter from Nazareth, God makes clear where one has to be in order to hear the divine word and experience divine presence.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986), p. 9

Naomi Klein photo
Karl Jaspers photo
Anthony Bourdain photo

“Obviously, being on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills brought more awareness to Erika Jayne and brought her out of the clubs and into people’s living rooms. I’m very thankful for that. I have nothing but great things to say about my experience.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to Yahoo https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/erika-jayne-wants-people-to-forget-their-005915255.html?guccounter=1 (2016)

Manav Gupta photo
Barry Boehm photo
Thomas Kuhn photo
Prem Rawat photo
Jane Roberts photo
Richard Leakey photo
Patrick Swift photo

“Its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

Albert Einstein photo

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Dr. H. L. Gordon (May 3, 1949 - AEA 58-217) as quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson ISBN 9780743264730
1940s

“When laughing children chase after fireflies, they are not pursuing beetles but catching wonder.When wonder matures, it peels back experience to seek deeper layers of marvel below. This is science's highest purpose.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"July 13th — Fireflies," page 139
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi photo
Larry Hogan photo
Dan Quayle photo

“In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get the future.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Speech in Illinois (October 1988), quoted in Cathleen Decker (1988-10-19), "Quayle, in Illinois, Says He's `the Future'" Los Angeles Times