Are Books More Important Than Experiences?
Essay by people • March 8, 2011 • Essay • 608 Words (3 Pages) • 5,353 Views
Are books more important than experiences?
From the past time, human has gained knowledge through many ways to improve our life. Throughout a long history until today, people never stop widen our knowledge because it is limitless. We can acquire knowledge from many source but we often learn it from books or through experiences. Both of them are very important for everybody.
First of all, experiences provide some knowledge which it is hard for us to learn from books. Experiences are something we can only achieve from reality or practice. We can learn the theory from books but it does not mean we can do it properly. For example, most people learn how to swim from the guide of experienced people. Of course, they can read the manual and know all the steps for swimming. However, they can never swim without going to the pool to practice. Besides, they often find it difficult to swim if they only read the books. Almost everyone admit that it will be much easier to swim with the help from experienced people.
A further advantage of experience is that it helps us do everything faster. With the experiences from the past, we can do something we already know more quickly and smoothly. Books may provide all the knowledge which we need for our work but it can not help us do everything without any mistake for the first time. For instance, we often can not bake a cake very well from the start. It may be too sweet or too hard to eat. After that, the experience from the first time we do it will help we do better next time.
Last but not least, only from experiences, we can know how to deal with some difficult situation in our life. No books can teach us how to behave with people around. Life is always complicated. We often cope with difficulties which we never expect. We can not rely on some book to treat with a friend who steals our money. We just can have more experience after it and never believe that friend again. Experience helps us not make the same mistake as we did in the past.
On the contrary, books are not useless. Human do not write books if we only need experiences to do everything. Books are the most basic source of knowledge which people can learn from. Books include a great deal of knowledge from the past till today. Everyone knows that traveling through time is impossible. Thus, how can we know something from the past? We can never have experience about dinosaurs, the collapse of the Roman Empire or something like that in life. People can only learn all that knowledge from books.
Finally, books are a very effective way to gain new knowledge. People can achieve a large amount of knowledge in the short time when we read books. Time wait no one. As a result, books are always a good idea for many people to learn without spend so much time on it while we need a long time to have experiences. Books save not only our time but also our energy. When we want to have experiences
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