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.

He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls.

[To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw - to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer - if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions - we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

It is a mark of prudence never to trust wholly in those things which have once deceived us.

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.

Life is short, but the years are long.

Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way.

The first time I was a drill instructor I was too inexperienced for the job - the things I taught those lads must have got some of them killed. War is too serious a matter to be taught by the inexperienced.

You live and learn. Or you don't live long.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

As for the woods' excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

A man looks at the sea, and the sea says something to him. It makes an impression on his mind. It awakens his memory, and this impression depends upon his experience - upon his intellectual capacity. Another looks upon the same sea. He has a different brain; he has a different experience. The sea may speak to him of joy, to the other of grief and tears. The sea cannot tell the same thing to any two human beings, because no two human beings have had the same experience.

Everything in nature tells a different story to all eyes that see and to all ears that hear. So, when we look upon a flower, a painting, a statue, a star, or a violet, the more we know, the more we have experienced, the more we have thought, the more we remember, the more the statue, the star, the painting, the violet has to tell. Nature says to me all that I am capable of understanding - gives all that I can receive. As with star, or flower, or sea, so with a book. A thoughtful man reads Shakespeare. What does he get? All that he has the mind to understand. Let another read him, who knows nothing of the drama, nothing of the impersonations of passion, and what does he get? Almost nothing. Shakespeare has a different story for each reader. He is a world in which each recognizes his acquaintances.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

Doctors is all swabs...and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes - what do the doctor know of lands like that? - and I lived on rum, I tell you.

What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought... occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like... because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things...

Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible.

Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it may be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience. (2000)

Wonder is from surprise, and surprise stops with experience.

I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.

It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you're readin' done, An' turn another - likely not so good; But what you're after is to turn 'em all.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you cannot eat.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

I also appeal to those who have already done most of their work for society. I hope that the changes you awaited or worked for for so long will bring joy and satisfaction into your lives. We need your experience, your wisdom and your love.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

A full 'definition of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants.

Setting aside the fact that coercion and guidance can never succeed in producing virtue, they manifestly tend to weaken power; and what are tranquil order and outward morality without true moral strength and virtue? Moreover, however great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

I was managed and governed by M. de Chievres, and I was not old enough to know these Kingdoms or experienced enough to govern them. And as I left immediately for Flanders, having spent very little time there, and what is more, being still unmarried and without an heir, it is not surprising that there was scandal and disturbance.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

I am obviously different from people in the past. I am, obviously, older and I have been in the music business for a little while as an actor, a singer and whatnot. Hopefully, I bring a

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws - all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages - are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all. What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions - a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love - the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see.

... the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic. ...

We may observe, that, notwithstanding the dogmatical, imperious style of all superstition, the conviction of the religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real, and scarcely ever approaches, in any degree, to that solid belief and persuasion, which governs us in the common affairs of life. Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects: They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and most positive bigotry. But nature is too hard for all their endeavours, and suffers not the obscure, glimmering light, afforded in those shadowy regions, to equal the strong impressions, made by common sense and by experience. The usual course of men's conduct belies their words, and shows, that their assent in these matters is some unaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief and conviction, but approaching much nearer to the former than to the latter.

I'm a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with my Honolulu Mama Doin' Those Beat-o, Beat-o Flat-On-My-Seat-o, Hirohito Blues

Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.

And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce

Mozart does not give the listener time to catch his breath, for no sooner is one inclined to reflect upon a beautiful inspiration than another appears, even more splendid, which drives away the first, and this continues on and on, so that in the end one is unable to retain any of these beauties in the memory. ~ Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf