Quotes About Experience

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

This is a very simple Rule, but one to which there should be no exception — never to go beyond your own experience.

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.

Yeah, that's funny, huh?...Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.

Durante esos largos de años de soledad y sufrimiento, Dios me condujo a una comprensión de la vida y de su amor que solo quienes la han experimentado son capaces de entender. Me despojó de muchos de los consuelos externos, físicos y religiosos, en los que se apoya el hombre y me dejó como única guía un núcleo esencial de verdades aparentemente simples.

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

Because it is such a powerful force in the world today, the Western Judeo-Christian tradition is often accepted as the arbiter of 'natural' behavior of humans. If Europeans and their descendant nations of North America accept something as normal, then anything different is seen as abnormal. Such a view ignores the great diversity of human experience.

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They

As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little.

The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. "The intolerable burden of thought.

War is the greatest human experience that men have passed through for many centuries. But only when we know, through their own words, the full horror of what they experienced, and the depth and complexity of their feelings when under duress, can we appreciate how they held together and saved the world from despotism.

There's a reason for every journey, and mine was prompted by boredom and the recklessness of youth, by a wish to break the bounds of my normal existence and familiarise myself with life and the world at large.

Why not ask yourself whether your other dreams are real? You go on trips and undergo the strangest experiences every night. How do you know they only take place in your mind?

Es kommt nicht darauf an, was auf der Bühne geschieht. Sondern darauf, was das Unsichtbare Theater in deinem Kopf veranstaltet.

That was a day that taught me the meaning of abject failure.

Nog één ding, jongen, wat je in je oren moet knopen: het gaat niet om hoe een verhaal begint. Ook niet om hoe het eindigt. Maar om wat daartussenin gebeurt.

Das Leben, mein Junge, ist nicht nur eine wilde, schöne Reise. Leben, das heißt auch: dem Tod bei der Arbeit zuzusehen. Das ist das Härteste überhaupt! Das muss man aushalten können. Bist du bereit, das auszuhalten, mein Junge?

Ist es nicht absurd, dass einem die Erinnerung an gute Zeiten viel eher die Tränen in die Augen treibt als die an schlechte?

Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.

Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere.