Quotes About Experience

I learnt more about politics during one South Dakota dust storm than in seven years at the university.

I let you find all those polytheistic truths yourself; life in them, find the joy in them, and even sorrow. But in these joys and sorrows rest content with the thought that they give meaning to our world.

Het leven is niet mogelijk zonder het leergeld van de ontgoocheling.

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.

It is not always the going from bad to worse that causes a revolution. It happens more often that a people who have borne without complaint, and apparently without feeling, most oppressive laws, throw them off violently as soon as their weight lightens. The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform.

It is not true that people learn nothing from history: they are marvellous at learning the wrong lessons.

Personally I think birthdays and anniversaries are like menstrual cramps, a regular pain in the ass thats somehow connected to birth.

But I just know from experience that accent wise, even if you're an accent genius, crossing the Atlantic is the hardest thing in the world either way.

Women are frightening. If you get to 41 as a man, you're quite battle-scarred.

I once sang 'Summer Nights ' from 'Grease ' at a bar in Melbourne with John Travolta, who's a good friend of mine. He looked cool singing the part of Danny - sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigar - while I got stuck playing Sandy.

My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven't fallen since.

There weren't many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in you mind to see how much you can learn. So that's what I did...

Rayner avait sans doute une dizaine d'années de plus que moi. Ce qui ne pose en soi aucun problème. J'entretiens des relations chaleureuses, sans bras cassés, avec quantité de personnes de cet âge.

Don't go to Casablanca expecting it to be like the film. In fact, if you're not too busy, and your schedule allows it, don't go to Casablanca at all.

I realise it must be strange for you, being here in England. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I've heard a lot of this before.

I had an absolutely revolting lunch with O'Neal. Although the food was pretty good.

Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.

There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.

My life is every moment of my life. It is not a culmination of the past.

The truth is that we will learn nothing from our sadness, our suffering, our disappointments or our failures unless we give ourselves time to experience them to the full, reflect on them, learn from them or, in modern parlance, process them.

When books sweep the world with characters and plots that seem unutterably grim...you have to ask whether we willingly incorperate such material into our lives because we need more shadows, clouds, drama, or perhaps because vicarious exposure to such material equips us, psychologically, for potential exposure to the real thing. [p35, Chapter 1 Taking the rough with the smooth]

we might do well to accept that a noble, courageous, well-lived life is one in which we are equipped to experience and negotiate the full range of emotions: neither seduced by the lure of happiness nor obsessed by the grim and gritty aspects of life, but open to whatever comes and ready to learn from it all.

People talk of calf-love with wistful disdain, but mine was as intense as any emotion I knew until I crossed the frontier, years later, when I discovered that all loving is a loving of life in the midst of death.

perfectionism is a slow death. if everything were to turn out just like i would want it to, just like i would plan for it to, then i would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless repetition of stale successes. when i make a mistake i experience something unexpected.... when i have listened to my mistakes i have grown.