Quotes About Experience

The highest, most satisfying experiences in people's lives were when they were in flow.

The monsters want to talk, to share what happened. They want me to remember and write it all down.

Like standing in a creek with the water flowing against your legs, you know?

A little bit of self-experimentation never hurt anybody, except when it did.

I'm the hero of my own story, but others tell their stories as well.

I don't think. I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn't human or inhuman-it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.

A prayer culture is fueled by experience not explanation. A passion to seek the Lord in prayer is more caught than taught.

Half of all believers say they do not feel they have entered the presence of God or experienced a genuine connection with Him in the past year.

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing."

The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing."

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration, from the cautious quest for what they knew (or what they thought they knew) was out there, to an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown.

We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or have a strong emotional component.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.

Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world. This

Spend time with people younger than you. See your doctor regularly, but not obsessively. Don't think of yourself as old (other than taking prudent precautions). Appreciate your cognitive strengths—pattern recognition, crystallized intelligence, wisdom, accumulated knowledge. Promote cognitive health through experiential learning: traveling, spending time with grandchildren, and immersing yourself in new activities and situations. Do new things.

Music is being used to manipulate our emotions, and we tend to accept, if not outright enjoy, the power of music to make us experience these different feelings.

on sad songs] In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.

He would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones forever changed the way I listened to music.

But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting.