Quotes About Experience

Every Sunday night in the novitiate our community gathered for "faith sharing," which meant speaking to one another about our spiritual lives: where we had experienced God in our daily lives and what our prayer was like. There were two rules. First, everything was confidential. Second, no comments were allowed after someone spoke, unless it was a question asked to clarify something.

Savoring slows us down. In the examen we don't recall an important experience simply to add it to a list of things that we've seen or done; rather, we savor it as if it were a satisfying meal. We pause to enjoy what has happened. It's a deepening of our gratitude to God, revealing the hidden joys of our days. As Anthony de Mello said, "You sanctify whatever you are grateful for." The

On the way out of the theater, I brushed away the tears, worried that my friend would notice. Suddenly he turned to me. "What a waste of a life!" he snapped. "All that suffering for nothing!" His comments shocked me. It was the first time I realized that my feelings toward religion might be the opposite of what others experienced.

Religious experiences are often dismissed—not out of doubt that they aren't real, but out of fear that they are real after all.

So, when I entered the Jesuits, at age twenty-seven, I did so with only an eleven-year-old's knowledge about the faith.

after the birth of her first child. It read: "Full of unexplainable love. And exhausted to the bone." Some things are difficult to describe, even for the most articulate, and sometimes the descriptions seem contradictory. It's hard to put big experiences into words.

Merton said many times that when it comes to spirituality, experience is the place to start.

birth of her first child. It read: "Full of unexplainable love. And exhausted to the bone." Some things are difficult to describe, even for the most articulate, and sometimes the descriptions seem contradictory. It's hard to put big experiences into words.

Few people have "heard" God's voice in a physical way (that is, few sane people).

Horses don't live thirty years,

What is laughter… but somehow the cabaletta to grief?

His eyes had seen it all. He was 24 years old.

What we dream up must be lived down, I think.

Dad reckons if you have a great time in one place, then that's a good reason for never going back. Nothing will ever measure up to the first time. He laughs at people who go to the same place every year, same beach, same house, same things to do.

As Edward Albee put it neatly in his play The Zoo Story (1958): What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly….

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life

I have experienced real horror. I have known true evil. Its name is human nature.

The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.

It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.

Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste. If waste is the result of our indifference to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a species of culture. Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be.

But what resounds most deeply in the life of Copernicus is the journey that made knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the journey successful.

Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play.

The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.

Therefore, the importance of reducing time in travel: by arriving as quickly as possible we need not feel as though we had left at all, that neither space nor time can affect us-as though they belong to us, and not we to them.