Quotes About Experience

How easily something you thought was safely buried in your past could suddenly come back and cut you to the quick.

This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.

When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.

One key reason for this is that the top-down, procedural planning approach is highly dependent on making predictions about the future based on past experience.

I'm being haunted, she blurted out. My dear, he cooed. Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission.

She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride.

She thought it was too bad it didn't work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years. But

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

Nice days, terrible nights.

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.

I know this doesn't make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn't the food even better? I mean, a lot better?

In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

You're a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard—hard—but you gotta learn 'em. Most people don't learn what you bein' taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that's what you been learnin'.

Being seventy-six has a few advantages, one of them being that a premature demise is no longer possible.

The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.

As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind.

A prerequisite for finding our way through any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can't begin until we've been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar.

We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.

Our lives may take place over decades. But they're made of one long string of present moments like these. Of course, not all of these moments are this memorable, nor do they have to be. But they're all equally real. You're having a present moment right now. Now you're having another one.

I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow. (Quoted by Josh Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)

I was also moved by William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, which not only helped me put my childhood experience in perspective but also showed me how my search to find a new, more authentic spiritual identity fit within the vast landscape of American culture.

Christian doctrine which is presented to the mind and will, and is received by faith, is proved by experience.

When we're young, we think we know all there is to know. Then we grow older, and the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know. It takes a wise man to realize just how much he doesn't know.

When we're young, we think we know all there is to know. Then we grow older, and the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.