Selected experience quotes

1. To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

2. I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

3. Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

4. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

5. Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

6. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

7. The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

8. I've always believed in experiencing everything in life. When you walk out with blinders on, you cut yourself off from the angels and the fairies.

9. There is such a difference between life and theory.

10. Variety is the soul of pleasure.

11. It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

12. Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.

13. If you never try anything new, you'll miss many of the world's great disappointments.

14. I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

15. We are made of emotions. We are all looking for emotions, basically. It's only a question of finding the way to experience them.

16. I really learned it all from mothers.

17. I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

18. Been there, done that, seen it, heard it, pissed on it.

19. I'm not as soft or as generous a person as I would be if the world hadn't changed me.

20. Sundance is weird. The movies are weird - you actually have to think about them when you watch them.

21. When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.

22. This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.

23. You ride in a limousine the first time, it's a big thrill but after that it's just a stupid car.

24. The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.

25. The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

26. Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

27. Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.

28. I know what's best for me, after all I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody.

29. I've held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience.

30. The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.

31. Reality trumps rationality.

32. Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission.

33. I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

34. You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

35. Literature is analysis after the event.

36. The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

37. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

38. Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

39. In youth, what disappointments of our own making: in age, what disappointments from the nature of things.

40. The man of wisdom is the man of years.

41. And all the world is football shaped, It's just for me to kick in space, And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, And I've got one, two, three, four, five Senses working overtime, Trying to take this all in, I've got one, two, three, four, five Senses working overtime, Trying to taste the difference, 'Tween the lemons and limes, The pain and the pleasure, And the church bells softly chime.

42. The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu's dictum: Those who know do not say;Those who say do not know. When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the master, 'Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?' All of them indicated that they knew. Then he said, 'put it into words.' All of them were silent.

43. A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action ... with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. (1449b24)

44. He who feels it, knows it Lord.

45. 'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, 'the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience - by experience.'

46. A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.

47. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

48. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

49. Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

50. One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

51. Purple haze, all in my brain Lately things just don't seem the same, Acting funny, but I don't know why, 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

52. Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience; and casts light into the cavern through which he worked his cause up to the cheerful day.

53. Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

54. I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.

55. I like vending machines 'cuz snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it so that it achieves it's maximum flavor potential.

56. I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.

57. You can look at a slum or peasant village...but it is only by entering into the world-by living in it-that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.

58. War is sweet to those who have no experience of it, but the experienced man trembles exceedingly at heart on its approach.

59. As the Spanish proverb says, 'He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.' So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

60. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

61. Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

62. Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits...A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

63. Some people skip through life; some people are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder whether we are moving through time of time is moving through us.

64. All languages and literatures are full of general observations on life, both as to what it is, and how to conduct oneself in it; observations which everybody knows, which everybody repeats, or hears with acquiescence, which are received as truisms, yet of which most people first truly learn the meaning when experience, generally of a painful kind, has made it a reality to them. How often, when smarting under some unforeseen misfortune or disappointment, does a person call to mind some proverb or common saying, familiar to him all his life, the meaning of which, if he had ever before felt it as he does now, would have saved him from the calamity. There are indeed reasons for this, other than the absence of discussion; there are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realised until personal experience has brought it home. But much more of the meaning even of these would have been understood, and what was understood would have been far more deeply impressed on the mind, if the man had been accustomed to hear it argued pro and con by people who did understand it. The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors. (pp. 53-54)

65. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age:

66. Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.

67. Dulce bellum inexpertis.

68. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.

69. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow It's cloud illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all.

70. A man must serve his time to every trade Save censure-critics are ready-made.

71. Don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there; you've seen nothing but the map

72. I never would have become president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota.

73. Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.

74. As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.

75. 'Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama?' That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there ... it's not necessary to answer the question, 'Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?' before you decide to listen to it and like it or not.

76. One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.

77. Of all kinds of fate the least deceptive is the one that is lived.

78. The way to true mysticism leads up through rational thought to deep experience of the world and of our will-to-live. We must all venture once more to be 'thinkers,' so as to reach mysticism, which is the only direct and the only profound world-view. We must all wander in the field of knowledge to the point where knowledge passes over into experience of the world. We must all, through thought, become religious. This rational thought must become the prevailing force among us, for all the valuable ideas that we need develop out of it. In no other fire than that of the mysticism of reverence for life can the broken sword of idealism be forged anew.

79. Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...

80. From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life.

81. I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.

82. 'An ordinary man can in a day's time travel by train from a dead little town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust, and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a great capital city bristling with lights, gestures, and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China, the London and New York suffragettes, Doctor Carrel, and the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo:' ~ Filippo Tommaso (F.T.) Marinetti, Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom (June 1913)

83. 'Quemad viejos lenos, leed viejos libros, bebed viejos vinos, tened viejos amigos.'

84. 'If all be dark, vague voice,' I said, 'These things are wrapt in doubt and dread, Nor canst thou show the dead are dead. 'The sap dries up: the plant declines. A deeper tale my heart divines. Know I not Death? the outward signs? 'I found him when my years were few; A shadow on the graves I knew, And darkness in the village yew.

85. the little death. What would or could be left of a human being after such an experience?

86. Our only truth is our sorrow.

87. Everyone that works on the show (on the TV side) has done serious time in commercials and movies and we tend to treat every episode of Good Eats like a little movie. I direct them just as I did commercials, heavy on composition.

88. Life is always the best teacher, no matter what you're doing.

89. Let me ask you a question...: the first time you fucked her, was she any good? Yeah? Now let me ask you another question: how do you think she got that way?

90. I go into these all-night 24 hour convenience stores, they got people in there. People? Things. These aren't even people, they don't even have a language to things that work in there. You go in for soda, cigarettes. You're like, 'Yeah, how much? How much?' And they're like 'Eh gooey buck and dee! Ah gooey buck--' And I'm like, you fuckin' geek! Where do they grow you? What farm were you picked out of?

91. I went to China, I didn't want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great.

92. Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

93. Arsene has undoubtedly been one of the biggest influences on the modern-day Premiership. His 10 years at Arsenal have flown by, and there haven't been too many bad times. It was an absolute pleasure to play under him and I'm sure the players who are currently in the squad would agree.

94. Un soir, j'ai assis la Beaute sur mes genoux. - Et je l'ai trouvee amere. - Et je l'ai injuriee.

95. 'Tis of no matter, your Highness, I have seen their backs before.

96. Emotion, pleasure and challenge.

97. When they accepted their assignments they were not very confident, especially the assistant head surgeon who simply believed in his own past experience, in the statistics of international medical literature, and in the medical equipment and resources of the hospitals in capitalist countries. Therefore when he first heard the talk of the vice-superintendent, who was the secretary of the general Party branch, he had some inner feeling of resistance. He thought to himself, 'This is simply coercing people to try and do the impossible! But since I have accepted the assignment I'll do what I can. At any rate, the patients will die either in the shock stage or later.' With such downhearted feelings he entered the ward to see his patients.

98. Evolution is more grounded in my experience than angels.

99. So when black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, 'The Audacity of Hope,' Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American.

100. I think the problem Barack Obama would have is, first of all, he's never run a city, never run a state, never run a business. I don't think, at a time when America's at war, with the major problems that we face, we're going to want someone to get on- the-job experience as the chief executive, never having had that kind of experience. [...] He really doesn't have the experience either from the national security point of view or even from just the executive point of view.