Quotes About Experience

Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.

It was better not to remember such terrible details.

Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.

In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.

Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime.

A man who does not understand the benefit of suffering does not live a clever and true life.

What is music? What does it do to us? And why does it do to us what it does? People say that music has an uplifting effect on the soul: what rot! It isn't true. It's true that it has an effect, it has a terrible effect on me, at any rate, but it has nothing to do with any uplifting of the soul. Its effect on the soul is neither uplifting nor degrading — it merely irritates me.

music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. I become confounded with his soul, and with him I pass from one condition to another. But why that? I know nothing about it? But he who wrote Beethoven's 'Kreutzer Sonata' knew well why he found himself in a certain condition.

The further back he looked, the more life there had been in him; both the more sweetness to life, and the more of life itself. And the two tendencies had become firmly intertwined.

To know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would go home next day.

Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have.

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

All that world, that sky, that garden, that air, were not the same as I had known.

Well, dear heart,' said he, 'I wanted to tell you about it yesterday, and I have come to do so today. I've never experienced anything like it before. I am in love, my friend!' Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person down on the sofa beside Prince Andrei. 'With Natasha Rostova, yes?' said he.

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She wanted too much to live herself.

The sense of human freedom, it seems to Tolstóy, is given only to those who have suffered. In

All of us, especially you women, have to go for themselves through all the nonsense of life to come back to life itself

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.

Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.

The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: 'Rien ne forme un juene homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut'.{1}

your consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations.

The day before yesterday I spent the night at Arzamas and something extraordinary happened to me. It was 2 o'clock in the morning. I was terribly tired, I wanted to go to sleep and I felt perfectly well. But

I'd never been around a homicide detective. But I grew up reading crime novels and had an idea what to expect. It turned out those books hadn't made me as smart as I thought.