Quotes About Experience

Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten.

It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. Alaska had enlarged each of us. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska.

Still, as much as I had experienced, there was more waiting to be found. I had started out with a feeling of burning dullness and desperation. Now I was filled with a thrill and expectation of new discovery.

The fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, experienced as torture by those who hate him: the very light of God's truth, hated and fled from in vain by those who love darkness.

Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of the imagination.

But if he had come down from the Cross, he would have made it impossible for them to believe in him, for he would have substituted sight for faith. That is why he does not take us down from our crosses: so that we do not substitute feelings and experiences for faith. He wants the very best for us, the strongest and most precious gift, and that is faith.

And on earth, pain and pleasure are strangely akin at their peak, like death and life. When a thing is enormously beautiful, it hurts.

What just happened?" Amy said. "We were in a ninja fight," Dan said in amazement. "For the first time in my nonvirtual life. And I hated it.

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, 'I've been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it's been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We're fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.

the future lay in cultivating the scientist in all of us. If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves, and the world.

When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.

I'd have a nervous breakdown except that I've been through this too many times to be nervous.

YOUTH is indeed wasted on the Young and Adventurous.

Something occurs, in the motion of the present, but it's already over. Because even then, even as she watched, she was already moving away from it, already thinking about how years from now she might tell someone about this.

For me, all stories are fiction. The only question is: Does it rattle the soul or not?

They seemed to dispense with the need to represent space in the interests of directly manifesting it.

Exhibitions were experiments.

Well, it certainly seems that mankind learns nothing from history, so why should individuals learn anything from their own experience?" "I'm no expert, but that sounds like spurious logic to me.

lost a bit at a time, over the years; it didn't just happen overnight. But there were intense experiences, epiphanies of a kind, that brought about quantum leaps.

realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.

We have to be something more than the accumulation of things that happen to us, don't you think?

Peter Robinson