Quotes About Experience

People greatly value knowledge and intelligence, but not wisdom.

Chuang Tzu's message for us is not to completely discard books but to put them in their proper place by understanding the limitation of words. Reading a description of how to make wheels can never give you the skills you will gain by actually making them. Similarly, reading a book about the Tao can never give you the wisdom you will gain by actually living life.

Use hands-on experience to find the optimal balance in everything. Whatever you need to do, there will be the right speed and the right amount of force to give you the best possible results. Keep in mind that this is something you can only learn from life itself—not from books.

We are never intended by God to stop short at an experience, a doctrine, a revelation, or a blessing. Thank God for every one of those things that we receive, but we cannot rest in them. Each one of them, in a sense, is somewhat impersonal and impermanent. What we need, in the last resort, is a person. And every true doctrine or revelation we receive will always lead us in the end to the person of God Himself.

I read, I travel, I become

Who is the man who can speak to the strong? Where is the fool who can talk to the wise? Men who are dead now have learnt this long, Bitter is wisdom that fails when it tries.

If you are able to talk about your life and the joys and sorrows you have experienced, if you know your story, you are much more likely to be a skillful parent.

Our common experience in fact is the opposite—that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we find it has an uncanny habit of returning to hold us hostage.

It is important to tell your story. It is equally important not to get trapped in your story. It is not what happened to us that matters but how what happened hurt us.

How do you convey that sense of freedom that tasted like sweet nectar for the first time? How do you explain it to someone who was born into freedom? It is impossible to convey. It is ineffable, like trying perhaps to describe the color red to a person born blind. It is a feeling that makes you want to cry and laugh at the same time, to dance with joy, and yet fearful that it was too good to be true and that it just might all evaporate.

The proper way to eat a fig, in society, Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump, And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

She lifts the lid from the pan of smoked green wheat kernels and dips in a spoon. Here. Taste. He holds the spoon in his mouth for a moment. She knows what he is tasting, how the broth is flavored with pepper and garlic and lustrous, deep smokiness. And try this, she says. Vibrant vegetable greens, garlic, and lemon. And this. Herbal, meaty, vaguely fruity.

She takes a bite of the custardy penne cotta and it melts into a dozen separate flavors. She can smell oranges and lemons, cherry and wood, and even the soft silk and wool of Persian carpets, the smell that she thought came from Iraq.

Advice? You're too old to be given it and too young to take it.

Does it bother you that I'm not a virgin? He hesitated a moment before answering. Well, no, he said slowly, so long as it doesna bother you that I am. He grinned at my drop-jawed expression, and backed toward the door. Reckon one of us should know what they're doing.

He wanted to ask whether she were insane, but he had been married long enough to know the price of injudicious rhetorical questions.

As yet too hungry and too clumsy for tenderness, still he made love with a sort of unflagging joy that made me think that male virginity might be a highly underrated commodity.

marriage is made not in ritual or in words but in the living of it.

Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth.

How many 'inventions' are really memories, of the things we once knew?

Sometimes twenty years seemed like an instant, and sometimes it seemed like a very long time indeed.

Come to think, perhaps being nearly killed wasn't always a misfortune-so long as you didn't actually die of it.

I didn't know what it was about red hair, but many years' experience with Jamie, Brianna, and Jemmy had taught me that while most people became irritable when hungry, a redheaded person with an empty stomach was a walking time bomb.

Is it true—that I won't forget?" He paused for a moment, hand on her hair. "Aye, that's true," he said softly. "But it's true, too, that it willna matter after a time.