“Create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you are able to face the world with the ability to understand it, not just conform to it. One can tell for oneself whether the water is warm or cold. In the same way, a man must convince himself about these experiences, only then are they real.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 208)
Experiential Learning Quotes
“Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you life it. In strategy all of life is a game that you are playing. This game is exciting but also requires deep and serious attention. The stakes are so high. What you know must translate into action, and action must translate into knowledge. In this way strategy becomes a lifelong challenge and the source of constant pleasure in surmounting difficulties and solving problems.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 303)
“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead
“We can understand wisdom in three ways: first, by meditation; this is the most noble way. Secondly, by being influenced by someone or following someone; this is the easiest way. Third is the way of experience; this is the most difficult way.”
Confucius, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 185)
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell
“Only the truth which was acquired by your own thinking, through the efforts of your intellect, becomes a member of your own body, and only this truth really belongs to us.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 146)
“We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.”
Baron De Montesquieu, The Daily Laws (Page 51)
“You can achieve wisdom in three ways. the first way is the way of meditation. This is the most noble way. The second way is the way of imitation. This is the easiest and least satisfying way. Thirdly, there is the way of experience. This is the most difficult way.”
Confucius, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 41)
“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us… The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”
Marcel Proust, via The Daily Laws (Page 5)
“We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that marks our lives. One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.”
Merle Shain, via Sunbeams (Page 155)
“When your sparring partner scratches or head-butts you, you don’t then make a show of it, or protest, or view him with suspicion or as plotting against you. And yet you keep an eye on him, not as an enemy or with suspicion, but with a healthy avoidance. You should act this way with all things in life. We should give a pass to many things with our fellow trainees. For, as I’ve said, it’s possible to avoid without suspicion or hate.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 128)