Quotes About Experience

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history

Wine is] poetry in a bottle.

My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your fife, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there's nothing really to talk about.

I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.

You know when you're young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they're trying to be old men and they have no idea what that's like? It's just that stupid the other way around.

No man can walk away from his own story

Imagine being given a life and not understanding until its ugly end that the point was to live it.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual.

Youth and vigor are no match for age and treachery.

a common political mistake in the West, the belief that it's always an advantage for ambassadors to have long experience in China. Governments forget that, in the process of getting to know China and some of its powerful players, many succumb to Beijing's subtle influence techniques, so that an ambassador may in practice serve as a conduit for Beijing's messaging back to the Western capital.

Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.

The sound of the sea you hear in Proust, as if the whole book were a shell held to your ear, is the sound of the amniotic fluid, reminding you, across all your barriers of self-protection, that the first thing you ever heard was voices in the water.

a phrase among the refugees for how they felt about America: Dankbar aber ungülcklich (thankful but unhappy).

It is isn't easy to make someone who hasn't experienced it understand what it feels like, this martyrdom of being judged, devalued, disqualified, and misrepresented by journalists writing in haste who are bored by reading and who, for that matter, hardly ever read anything anyway. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.

In the Italian galleries even the guides regularly fingered the paint surface.

To put it briefly, the secret is to put it briefly. But you always think that's what you're doing, until experience teaches you that you aren't being brief enough.