Quotes About Experience

What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn't orchestrate.

If it happened, it happened. Why should it have to mean anything?

The reward for the watching eye and the listening ear is great. I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.

Then the elderly man said, "I have a story that will make you believe in God.

If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Certainly, anyone whom I've witnessed, who has gone through something horrible and life-changing, has a sense of ironic humor, or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.

Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head.

Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon... what it means to you.

Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don't look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by," Kerouac wrote. "Trails are like that: you're floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you're struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.

I am a shepherd, too, like Polyphemus, so I knew all about it.

Running is the same way. Learn it wrong, and you'll never know how good it can feel.

I've butchered my own chickens, milked my own goats, and ridden in Amish buggies, and believe me, when it comes to meals and daily commutes, you need only one go-round with those experiences to appreciate how nice it is to have machines take all the gore, udders, and manure off your hands.

To look at this country is grand; to travel in it, is Hell,

where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals

When it comes to mentors, you can't beat survival;

I had no expectations about fatherhood, really, but it's definitely a journey I'm glad to be taking. Number one, it's a great learning experience. When my mother told me it's a 24/7 job, she wasn't kidding.

I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.