To experience means to know facts just as they are. It means to abandon all self-fabrication entirely and to know in obedience to the facts.

経験するというのは事実其儘に知るの意である。全く自己の細工を棄てて、事実に従うて知るのである。

Kitarō Nishida

Philosophers

Kitarō Nishida

Born in 1870 in Kaga Province (present-day Ishikawa Prefecture), Nishida Kitaro was the pioneer of modern Japanese philosophy. Fusing deep Zen practice with the rigorous methods of Western philosophy, he introduced the foundational concept of 'pure experience' in his masterwork An Inquiry into the Good. As founder of the Kyoto School, he built an original philosophical system centered on the 'logic of place' — the first made-in-Japan contribution to the world's intellectual tradition.

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Source: 善の研究Verified

Kitarō Nishida's Other Quotes

Pure experience is the state of experience just as it is, with not the slightest addition of deliberative discrimination.

The good, in a word, is the realization of personality.

Think by becoming the thing; act by becoming the thing.

Others are others, I am I — regardless, I walk the path I walk.

Related Quotes

For thinking and Being are the same.

-- Parmenides

You must learn all things: both the steadfast heart of well-rounded Truth and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true trust.

-- Parmenides

Imagine prisoners chained underground since childhood, seeing only shadows on a wall and taking them for reality.

-- Plato

I know that I know nothing.

-- Socrates

Color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in reality there are only atoms and void.

-- Democritus

Those who understand that things arise dependently know them to be empty.

-- Nagarjuna