Quotes About Experience

The Buddha asks us to see things as they really are. He does not ask us to cling to optimistic views of eternity or pessimistic views of annihilation but simply to examine our experience.

Having everythin is boring; I'm convinced of that. Once you have something - knowledge, skills, possessions - or have achieved something - climbing Mount Everest, for example - it becomes banal.

Through my failures I have learned how to live - and the more I failed, the more I learned. In my search for the limits, I have failed more than most, and it is this that has made me successful, over and over again.

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

The origin of the religious impulse, in other words, is not rooted in our quest for meaning or our fear of the unknown. It is not born of our involuntary reactions to the natural world. It is not an accidental consequence of the complex workings of our brains. It is the result of something far more primal and difficult to explain: our ingrained, intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else we are, embodied souls.

Even al-Hallaj admitted that his experience of unity with God came after a long journey of inward reflection. "Your Spirit mixed with my Spirit little by little," he wrote of God in his Diwan, "by turns, through reunions and abandons. And now I am Yourself. Your existence is my own, and it is also my will.

It is simply up to the individual to decide what "the One" is: how it should be defined, and how it should be experienced

The more you embrace your humanity, the more divine your experience

Te escribo porque los años me han fijado los recuerdos como un sarro y el pasado se ha convertido para mí en un viejo tullido.

Porque Kafka descubre un nuevo modo de leer: la literatura le da forma a la experiencia vivida, la constituye como tal y la anticipa.

Por fin me ha sucedido algo. Por fin me ha sucedido algo, ¿no es sensacional?

Después Tardewski volvió a hablar de esa cualidad destructiva, de esa rara lucidez que se adquiere cuando se ha conseguido fracasar lo suficiente. Porque otra de las virtudes del fracaso, dijo, es que nos enseña que nunca nada deja su huella en el mundo. Todo lo que hemos vivido se borra y eso quizás, dijo, es lo que había comprendido esa mujer en el cuento de Marconi.

La gente, acá, aprende a vivir en las orillas de la desgracia. Los turistas llaman a esta miseria color local.

At times, intuition can lead to mistakes, although maybe less often than numbers-based decision-making. We've made our share of intuitive mistakes at Semco. Life is full of mistakes. But you won't catch me subscribing to the new age management mantra—to err is human, but erring twice is not so hot. I don't buy the notion that we must carefully study our mistakes in order not to repeat them.

But when I asked if she was behind 'You Can't Always Get What You Want,' she said, 'Absolutely. That's my song. Every time I hear it, I'm right back with Mick in the flat. Music can't tell time.

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

There are lessons in life that we all have to experience for ourselves. There are other lessons that we can learn from others, lessons that spare us the pain and cost of experience.

Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes.

An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown

It's okay is a cosmic truth…It's okay. If there were nothing here for us to learn, we wouldn't bother to pay the fare.

What would our lives be like without tests, odds against us, adventure, risk?

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go....