Quotes About Experience

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.

Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.

I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it.

You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it.

It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...

both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it.

And we would always be shaped by the experience, in ways we could not guess at the time.

So much of who we are is where we have been.

no smell of piss or green beans. That was how you could tell for sure it was an upscale old-age joint. It smelled instead like a summer meadow, it smelled of daisies, it smelled like a preview of coming attractions.

He closed his eyes for a moment and tasted the emotions before they slipped away.

At my age, the only time I don't have to pee is when I'm peeing.

We dont study philosophy, we rather do it.

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

It was silly to suppose that trials only hardened men, automatically making them wise. He knew many who were stupid, arrogant, and mean, in spite of having suffered.

Next to the very young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

The postman said there were two ways of meeting experience—you could expect pain or you could expect happiness. "Now, I'm going to look on the bright side until I know to the contrary," he said. "I'm going to look on the bright side, and keep saying everything's going to come out the way I want it to.

Miss Octavia, from the depth of her experience with children, spoke gently. "You will not be able to change her. The child lives in her own particular world, and I'm sure it isn't anything at all like the world you and I live in.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

Hob is not meant to Think. I see and then I Do. I do not put things together to make sense.

urban deprivation, the condition of being so sophisticated that you plumb the nature of most other people's experience out of your life like waste. Your attitudes are so glib and self-assured and automatic, you lose the necessary naivety that is living. That way, you eat everything and taste nothing.

I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed

Laidlaw had seen that quality of arbitrarily shifting perspective before, always in people whose environment was putting them under pressure. It was as if they had been overtaken by the hardness of their experience and mugged by it, so that they lived the rest of their lives concussed.