Vicarious Experience Quotes & Sayings

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience. — Albert Bandura

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen. — Roger Ebert

When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. — May Sarton

In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself. — Peter C Bunnell

Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, "Write about what you know," isn't limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your store of knowledge, part of what you're prepared to write about. The same goes for stories and memories that other people share with you. — James Carlos Blake

So much time is wasted on trying to be better than others. — Elijah Wood

The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand. If you can't afford an air ticket to Kuala Lumpur, you can always read Conrad and imagine yourself in South-East Asia. If you have been monotonously married for forty years, you can always lay furtive hands on a copy of James Joyce's letters. Literature on this view is a kind of supplement to our unavoidably impoverished lives - a sort of spiritual prosthesis which extends our capabilities beyond their normal restricted range. It is true that everyone's experience is bound to be limited, and that art can valuably augment it. But why the lives of so many people should be imaginatively impoverished is then a question that can be easily passed over. — Terry Eagleton

There's a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography - a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It's found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That's certainly not what we're after in these pages. No, we're after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the ... — Brian D. McLaren

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. — George Santayana

There is no such thing as vicarious experience. — Mary Parker Follett

I love Chicago, but I didn't think I had enough soul to be a Cubs fan. — Emmylou Harris

Yes, movies! Look at them - All of those glamorous people - having adventures - hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves - Goody, goody! - It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island - to make a safari - to be exotic, far-off! - But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move! — Tennessee Williams

There are five key characteristics that will tend to explain how quickly an innovation is adopted. They are (in order of importance):
1.Relative advantage is whether the innovation is better than what is out there already. This can be in effectiveness, economic or even prestige terms.
2.Compatibility is the extent that an innovation is consistent with existing values and norms.
3.Simplicity is the degree to which innovations are perceived to be easy to understand and use.
4.Trialability is the extent to which innovations can be experimented with on a limited basis. Trialability is particularly important to early adopters, as they have no vicarious experience to draw on.
5.Observability is the extent to which the results of an innovation are visible to others. — Gary Johnson

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things. — Jack Vance

In the New Testament the basic command of old covenant life, 'Be holy as I am holy', now means, 'Become like Jesus.' God involves himself in this work as the triune Lord: the Father commands it; the Son has died to provide the resources for it; the Spirit indwells us in order to effect it in our lives. As Augustine famously prayed, God commands what he wills and gives what he commands. — Sinclair B. Ferguson

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. — David Foster Wallace

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. — Douglas Rushkoff

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can. — John Dos Passos

I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience. You're born in one particular century at a particular time, and the only experience you can have directly is of the place you live and the time you live in. History is a way of giving you experience that you would otherwise be cut off from. — Edmund S. Morgan

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric. — Evelyn Waugh

If the losers are dead, the dead are also losers.
There is a contradiction here: If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived. — James P. Carse

History at its best is vicarious experience. — Edmund Morgan

You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models. — Charlie Munger

We get one chance at this life. We have one body, one mind, and one life to live. Reading provides us with a vicarious experience of others' lives. — Tony Reinke

We need to take time to connect with the poor, resist our unceasing cravings, and pray. But we also need to gather with friends and family, share in God's good provision, eat delicious food, tell stories that encourage us all, and celebrate the risen Lord. — Chris Seay

It was clear that the delight being taken ... was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense. — Iain M. Banks

All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience. — Tom Bissell

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. — Hilary Mantel

Joy. In every breath. In every moment. In every turn of the blossom to face the sun. In every stream of juice that trails my chin from fruit so sweet. In Him. In the coolness of the evening when He walks beside us and His laughter lifts across the river as He delights in our wonder over this place He has given us. In silence. In starlight. In shouting an anthem of gladness that shakes the earth and hails birds into flight. — Alanna Rusnak

If I played Bond, my dad probably wouldn't know what to do with himself. He'd probably put his shoes on the wrong way for the rest of his life! — Aneurin Barnard

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference — Albert Bandura