Quotes About Experience

Sometimes you have to get sad before you get happy 'cause otherwise how would you know the difference?

The years went by too quickly, that was the trouble. By the time you figured out that the times you were living were the best, they were over and nothing more remained than a few blurry snapshots and a handful of memories.

There's no such things as travel insurance when it comes to reading.

Growing up is like taking down the walls of your house and letting strangers in.

The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound.

If anything, I have learned that the worst pain never comes when I think it will, and never returns in the exact same way. You go to bed with one pain and wake up with another. It wears as many disguises as a masker at a ball. [Édouard Manet]

Age is so misleading--you are the same on the inside as ever, only your outsides are different. Or, perhaps you have changed, but it is not like the younger self goes away--you just go on adding layers to the onion. [Édouard Manet]

The idea that old men become peaceful or philosophical--what shit. One learns to endure, that is all. [Édouard Manet]

You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.

How long this lasted I can't imagine, it wasn't an imaginary time, it also didn't belong to the time  of things that happen.

Nothing moves an older man more than a confession of inexperience from a younger, particularly if the latter be his social superior.

Los días vividos, pletóricos o vacíos, tranquilos o agitados, son todos por igual días pasados, y la ceniza del pasado pesa lo mismo en todas las manos.

Youth fills the time to come with imagination; old age relives the past through memory. The two things are equivalent.

I'm doing the best I can. Getting old, that's what it is. I'll be fifty-three at the feast of Saint Michael. I'm no longer as strong as you are, young sirs,' said the ferryman.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.