A Quote by John Barth

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

John Barth

Quote Topics

Alive Always Betrayal Betrayed Categorize Classify Dealing Dealing With It Dealt Did Ever Experience Falsification Feel Kicking Man Only Speech Turn

Quote Author

John Barth
American - Writer
Born: May 27, 1930

To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize.

St. Jerome

That authentic experience that happens both in the artist and in the audience you can classify as a mystical experience. You can classify it as aesthetic shock, or even a psychedelic experience. Some people seek to recreate that experience through drugs. But the other way that you can do it is through art, and through spectacle. We have those experiences when we go to rock shows, or when we listen to a piece of classical music, or read a particular poem, or see a painting.

Janaka Stucky

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.

Robert Warshow

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

Anais Nin

Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

Henry David Thoreau

... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

Hannah Arendt

It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

Gustav Mahler

The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience - enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.

Thomas Sowell

Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter.

Harry Houdini

Philosophy begins with the understanding that you cannot just observe or experience and then report what you see, because how you conceptualize and symbolize alters experience.

Eugene Gendlin

Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr

Erich Fromm

One of the most critical reasons believers experience defeat is because we categorize only a few areas of our lives as Christ's arena.

Beth Moore

I'm a military man, I did what I did only because my country had to be saved from tribalism and feudalism. If I failed, it was only because I was betrayed. The so-called genocide was nothing more than just a war in defence of the revolution and a system from which all have benefited.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

Ramana Maharshi

When you have something as unique and special as the 'Fast & Furious' franchise, you want to create an experience for the fans that they can only feel and experience at Universal Parks.