Quotes About Experience

It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.

There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change when you were sad?

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

Lass dir Alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken. Man muss nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.

Art too is just a way of living.

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.

There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.

O Stunden in der Kindheit, da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur Vergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.

No feeling is final.

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.

Live for a while in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books -of this I am certain- will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.