Quotes About Experience

Just as infinite players can play any number of finite games, so too can they join the audience of any game. They do so, however, for the play that is in observing, quite aware that they are audience. They look, but they see that they are looking.

It is in the garden that we discover what travel truly is. We do not journey to a garden but by way of it.

I want to understand the world from your point of view. I want to know what you know in the way you know it. I want to understand the meaning of your experience, to walk in your shoes, to feel things as you feel them, to explain things as you explain them. Will you become my teacher and help me understand?

We don't come smart out of the box.

You get one life and it rolls out like a long hallway carpet. It begins on the day you are born and keeps on rolling until you drop. There's no refresh button, no start-over option.

We allow ourselves to believe that nature can be explained. In the process we confine nature to those explanations. The eels, through their simplicity of form, their preference for darkness, and their grace of movement in the opposite direction of every other fish, have helped me to see things for which there is no easy classification, things that can't be quantified or solved, and get to the essence of experience. They have been my way back.

Consistency, say some, is the sign of a small mind, but it's a real virtue with high-power technology. Having lots of the same devices out in the field lets us compile a record of experience.

If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

It never came down to two roads at all, or if it did, I took the one less traveled by for a driveway, or the entrance to a mall, or it slipped past like a station off the air while I bent down to fiddle with the dial.

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

In creating a "hold upon nearness" the poetic word creates a place where we can stand for a while, allowing us to bear witness to our own being.

young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be.

We must savor every moment given us," she stressed. "We know not where this journey ends so we must wring each scrap of joy out of it while it lasts.

The warmth and peace she had experienced before had nothing to do with gifts or blessings. It was this human touch. The warmth of family, the peace of self and certainty. That was blessing enough for anyone.

If you don't talk about it, it didn't happen.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon

Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.

My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow:Don't never prophesy—onless ye know.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

You can never really know the truth. Not about life, not about God, not about what's in another person's heart, or even your own. All you can ever really know is what it feels like. What it feels like to laugh and cry and hate and hurt and hope and fear and love; what it feels like to live.

memory will cut you off at the knees if you let it.

Bright Segment" -that's it. If I'm our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we're fortunate. Most don't. And the rest wasn't silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.

We live in snow globes, don't we? Pick them up, shake them, years swirl about us and settle.