Quotes About Experience

What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents . . . have not lived." Carl Jung

It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person's life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientially true is worthy of a mature spirituality.

The child's experience of the mother is internalized as a complex; an emotionally charged cluster of energy beyond the control of the ego.

for what we have most to share with them is not our learning or our techniques, but rather who we have become and what darkness we have faced in the world and in ourselves.

He was not saying that external reality does not exist; rather, that we can only know it subjectively.

Spiritual crises happen to us every day. Most of them are sufficiently low grade, devoid of enduring consequences, so we pay no attention and keep on rolling. A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world.

When you're living through them, events are nothing more than stuff that happens. You're not thinking about significance. Significance only comes when you look back at your life.

Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

Some day...as you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.

Did you ever hear the one about how every living woman dies three times? Once when she is seduced of her virginity, once when she is seduced of her freedom (I believe they call it marriage), and once when she is seduced of her husband.

Maybe he was a good man once, this old one, my predecessor, but they had worn him down, in thirty years, like a big knife made thin and fragile, needlelike, from constant honings. All that good steel just rubbed away no one knew where.

once in a dream somewhere, sometime, someplace, they had managed for a moment to touch another human soul and understand it.

suddenly you discovered you had it and had had it a long time without knowing it. That was the way it was with pain.

First we feel. Then we fall.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.

Life is too short to read a bad book

For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.

His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth.

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.