It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Kierkegaard
Something is only true if it can be lived.
Nietzsche
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey through the wilderness which no one can make for us, which no one else can spare us.
Proust
It is one of the laws of life that new meaning must be lived before it can be known, and in some mysterious way modern man knows so much that he is the prisoner of his knowledge. The old dynamic conception of the human spirit as something living always on the frontiers of human knowledge has gone. We hide behind what we know. And there is an extraordinarily angry and aggressive quality in the knowledge of modern man; he is angry with what he does not know; he hates and rejects it. He has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy. The experience which is before knowing, which would enflame his life with new meaning, is cut off from him. Curiously enough, it has never been studied more closely. People have measured the mechanics of it, and the rhythm, but somehow they do not experience it.
Van der Post
Metaphysical knowledge of another world is about as much use as knowledge of the chemical composition of water would be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.
Nietzsche
To believe in the Tao is easy; to keep the Tao is difficult.
Everyone knows the Way, but few walk it.
Lao Tzu
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
William Blake