Quotes About Experience

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information.

Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life.

mythology is an interior road map of experience, drawn by people who have traveled it.

The adventure is its own reward—but it's necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be.

Ustedes, todos ustedes, han obtenido algo de la vida: dinero, amor-cosas en tierra firme-, pero, ¿acaso el tiempo en que estuvimos embarcados no fue el mejor de nuestras vidas? Cuando éramos jóvenes en la mar; jóvenes sin nada, sobre la mar que nada regala, excepto buenos golpes y momentos para ponerte a prueba, sólo eso, ¿no sientes haberlo perdido?

Joseph Conrad once said that a man who is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea

He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.

all this life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the August light of abiding memories.

I don't know the world, nor yet the people in it; I have been too solitary - I am too young to trust my own opinions.

Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.

Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension.

But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.

I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone -- and to this day I don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience.