A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

Vladimir Nabokov

Quote Topics

Also Experience Live Meaningless Only Things Thoughts Without Words World

Quote Author

Vladimir Nabokov
American - Novelist
April 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977

All thoughts are just junk. Essentially, they are coming from the limited experience of past. These thoughts are useful for your survival process. You've picked up some amount of information; you want to survive in the world; this information is useful. If you're looking at life itself, these thoughts are meaningless.

Jaggi Vasudev

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Steven Pinker

Words without experience are meaningless.

Vladimir Nabokov

And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty

Fyodor Dostoevsky

When our thoughts look real, we live in a world of suffering. When they look subjective, we live in a world of choice. When they look arbitrary, we live in a world of possibility. And when we see them as illusory, we wake up inside a world of dreams.

Michael Neill

Apart from thoughts, there is no independent entity called the world. In deep sleep there are no thoughts, and there is no world. In the states of waking and dream, there are thoughts, and there is a world also. Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into itself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself.

Ramana Maharshi

I hope my novels will allow you to become lost in a world totally unlike the actual world we live in. I work hard to make the words evoke particular images, thoughts, feelings, the mystery of relationships.

Jay Neugeboren

Almost certainly, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind. Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world. Yet today 50 percent of the world’s population goes hungry. Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless.

Norman Borlaug

I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope.

P. J. Harvey

PJ Harvey

Whatever way you put it, I am here only because my world is here. When I took my first breath, my world was born with me. When I die, my world dies with me. In other words, I wasn't born into a world that was already here before me, nor do I live simply as one individual among millions of other individuals, nor do I leave everything behind to live on after me. People live thinking of themselves as members of a group or society. However, this isn't really true. Actually, I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die.

Kosho Uchiyama

Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

John Fowles

These glorious things-words-are man's right alone...Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog....for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

Charles Kingsley

We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.

bell hooks

I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.