685 Experience Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Reality trumps rationality.

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.

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.

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.

Literature is analysis after the event.

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

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

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

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

The man of wisdom is the man of years.

A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time - it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.

''Write what you know' is a tautology. You have no choice -- you have to write what you know, and in order to write something new, you have to learn something new.' Similar to a quote from the 1996 Boskone convention when Bujold was Guest of Honor.

Hands are integral with brains, almost another lobe for intelligence. What one does not know through one's hands, one does not truly know.

On all occasions of trial He has saved me. I know that the phrase 'God saved me' has a deeper meaning for me today, and still I feel that I have not yet grasped its entire meaning. Only richer experience can help me to a fuller understanding. But in all my trials - of a spiritual nature, as a lawyer, in conducting institutions, and in politics - I can say that God saved me. When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee', I experience that help arrives somehow, from I know not where.

Margaret Thatcher always gave me headaches.

'Love is the shit that makes life bloom and you never know when you might step in it!'

All that I know comes from Michael Jackson.

[to Randy Orton]: 'Listen to me, you little bastard. I was spilling blood on six continents while you were still latched onto your mother's breast!'

I have climbed mountain Iwato of Higo in Kyushu to pay homage to heaven, pray to Kwannon, and kneel before Buddha. I am a warrior of Harima province, Shinmen Musashi No Kami Fujiwara No Genshin, age sixty years. From youth my heart has been inclined toward the Way of strategy. My first duel was when I was thirteen, I struck down a strategist of the Shinto school, one Arima Kihei. When I was sixteen I struck down an able strategist Tadashima Akiyama. When I was twenty-one I went up to the capital and met all manner of strategists, never once failing to win in many contests.

You can know how to win through strategy with the long sword, but it cannot be clearly explained in writing. You must practise diligently in order to understand how to win.

There are various kinds of spirit involved in letting go the hilt. There is the spirit of winning without a sword. There is also the spirit of holding the long sword but not winning. The various methods cannot be expressed in writing. You must train well.

I'd like to borrow his body for just 48 hours. There are three guys I'd like to beat up, and four women I'd like to make love to.

At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

My drug period was between the age of 17 and 18. That was a time when I was experimenting with a lot of things, I was experimenting with sleep deprivation, fasting. The longest fast I ever did was 12 days. You go that long without food and you hallucinate. I would take this powder made out of guarana seed, my friend Mary would bake it up like cocoa in muffins and leave them on my doorstep. My drinking period was when I was 13, 14. Drugs fascinated me for a short period of time but not any more. A glass of wine puts me in a weird enough state.

'Live music is better! Bumper stickers should be issued!' - 'Union Man'

I shall in no time forget that moment. We felt as if we had had in our souls a clear passing glimpse into this wondrous World.

I really don't fear death. I never knew that.

She never finished the sentence, because at that moment [he] began to learn how to kiss a woman, and she, though she had never kissed a man before, became his tutor.

It's in the nature of young men to be lonely. Did you think you were unique?

You can't get that feeling anywhere else. It's communion. It's like being washed away in the ocean, carried aloft on a wave.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education--or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments--is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves... -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

What the worker needs is to see the plant as if he were a manager. Only thus can he see his part, from his part he can reach the whole. This 'seeing' is not a matter of information, training courses, conducted plant tours, or similar devices. What is needed is the actual experience of the whole in and through the individual's work. -- The New Society (1950)

Music is something that makes you feel, makes you think, and if you're really lucky, it makes you move.

To be in the presence of a great work of architecture is such a satisfaction that you can go hungry for days. To create a feeling such as mine in Chartres Cathedral when I was 13 is the aim of architecture.

Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year, And a sphere.

I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.

Then, if when I have lov'd my round, Thou prov'st the pleasant she, With spoils of meaner beauties crown'd I laden will return to thee, Ev'n sated with variety.

When I was younger I took jazz, but the teacher yelled at me and I never went back, ever again!

My convictions have validity for me because I have experimented with the compounds of ideas of others in the laboratory of my mind. And I've tested the results in the living out of my life. At twenty-one, I had drawn an abstract map based on the evidence of others. At sixty, I have accumulated a practical guide grounded in my own experience. At twenty-one, I could discuss transportation theory with authority. At sixty, I know which bus to catch to go where, what the fare is, and how to get back home again. It is not my bus, but I know how to use it.

The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.

If you remember the 1960s, you didn't live through them.

In my very first review I was already jaded, observing of 'Galia,' an obscure French film, that it 'opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave.' My pose in those days was one of superiority to the movies, although just when I had the exact angle of condescension calculated, a movie would open that disarmed my defenses and left me ecstatic and joyful.

Once is the kind of film I've been pestered about ever since I started reviewing again. People couldn't quite describe it, but they said I had to see it. I had to. Well, I did. They were right.

Therapeutic Experiencing: The Process of Change (1986)

People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I've passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously.

- All this sitting about in cafes to calm down Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature! The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross. I have lived it, and I know too much. My cafe nerves are breaking me With black, exhausting information.

I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was there guiding things. I was there bringing people there. But I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them.

My speaking is irregular. Sometimes quite good, sometimes not, but generally will do... I am too far along in experience and years both for this business. I do not go into [it] with the zest of old times. Races, baseball, and politics are for the youngsters.

I have to make it clear, however, that I haven't seen the whole film except for 20 minutes of the second part although I know the screenplay very well because Russians have a custom of making an extra copy for the author.

Our indirect methods have taught us a mountain of things about horses, but if you wished to learn even more, would you rather be Whirlaway in the stretch, than interview Eddie Arcaro afterwards?

'Michael Vick is the next Steve McNair, not the other way around. Michael hopes to one day have the experience and poise that Steve has.'

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

I did have Botox once and I felt like I'd had a stroke. It was so claustrophobic.

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

'Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.'

If the general government should persist in the measures now threatened, there must be war. It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.

'If you ask any of the women we've worked with, some of them would say it's a very tough journey, but I don't think any of them would say we'd been patronising.

Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance. It is rarely possible to see the Abbey without being surrounded by thousands of tourists from all over the world. Like St. Peter's at Rome, it has been turned into a sinister sort of railway terminal. The aisles are as crowded as the pavements of Oxford Street or the alleys of a large shop, imagination is jostled, awe dispersed, and the mind never at rest. All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people.

Albums are not the whole picture. You really need to go to loads of gigs to get the whole picture. That's really what it's about.

I was only abused by lawyers twice in my life - once when I was sued by one and once when I hired one.

The coldest day I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco (also attributed to Mark Twain)

A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. [citation needed]

The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason.

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization.

Other parks can have parades, they can have bands and thrill rides, and all that kind of stuff. But we have the Disney characters. Don't you realize how much they mean to people? A family comes into the park and they see one of our characters and they immediately have their child run over. They get their camera out and they take pictures of their little kids with Mickey or Minnie or Goofy or whoever happens to be there at the time. This is what people enjoy and this is what is important to us.

Let the viewer stroll around within the picture,to force him to forget himself and so to become a part of the picture.

To those who say that Wes Clark has never held political office: anyone who can command NATO, and keep all those forces together, and win that war without losing one American life, knows what it means to hold political office.