Quotes About Experience

Every year his world felt like it got a little smaller. Maybe that was just the way things went as people aged.

It's an invasion a-and I resent It.' 'A strange remark from a woman,' there was a caustic sting in his voice. 'It is my experience that your sex likes this invasion, as you call it. It is a subtle intrusion they can allow without risking their reputations.

Experience could not be acquired from the innocent, and in a way it is a schooling for the innocence we eventually acquire in a wife. If you have not known the devil you can never appreciate an angel.

Queaque ipsa miserrima vidi,et quorum pars magna fui. (And those terrible things I saw, and in which I played a great part.)

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuuabit.

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem

A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.

Each of us finds the world of death fitted to himself

to be Irish is to know the world will break your heart before you are thirty.

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

The moment was all; the moment was enough.

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.