Quotes About Experience

Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.

As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.

This is when I learned that mistakes are interesting and began planning a life that contained several of them.

You may think yellow is a color, but it isn't. It's a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers.

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine—ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be.

At some point between our high chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about later.

Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness.

When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.

several months had elapsed and it would

If you have a broken heart, it means you have done something big enough and important enough and valuable enough to have broken your heart.

Taking a Sagmeister," as I now call it, requires a fair bit of planning and saving, of course. But doesn't forgoing that big-screen TV seem a small price to pay for an unforgettable—and un-get-backable—year of personal exploration?

Said a forty-eight-year-old Ohio man: I regret not being more adventurous . . . taking time to travel, explore, and experience more of what the world has to offer. I let the fear of disappointment rule me and allowed others' expectations to be more important than my own. I was always the "good soldier" and worked hard to please those around me. I have a good life—I just wish I had more experiences to share with others. Someday . .

I'm convinced that Type I is the natural state—the default setting—for most human beings. By contrast, Type X behavior is something people learn through their experiences

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With boldness regrets, the human need is growth—to expand as a person, to enjoy the richness of the world, to experience more than an ordinary life.

Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories." —ROGER C. SCHANK, cognitive scientist

If you want a creative life, do what you can't and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make.

A fifty-year-old woman in Arkansas said: I had an abortion at age twenty. That is the biggest regret of my life. My second-biggest regret is that I had another one at age twenty-five.

I could instead launch an Expedia-for-the-regretful site, which would include special travel packages for the legions of college graduates in the surveys who regretted not studying abroad.

Be sure to include the design of experiences as well—buying a cup of coffee, taking a trip on an airplane, going to an emergency room.

began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that would make him famous. In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called "autotelic experiences"—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.