Quotes About Experience

What exactly is the role of the cerebral cortex in producing consciousness? The cortex expands the number of ways in which we can experience the world, which allows for a vast variety of possible conscious experiences and responses.

While the list of chimp tricks is long and dazzling, does this make them conscious beings in the same sense that humans are conscious? This is probably an ill-posed question. Perhaps the question should be "Does our conscious experience hold similar contents to that of a chimp?

The real mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be experienced. —J. J. Van der Leeuw

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

Women have been deceiving men since the Garden of Eden. They've had centuries of practice.

In my experience, we only ever regret the things we have not done

When you've lived as long as I have, nothing much surprises you.

There are some adventures not worth having.

We humans are nothing more than the sum of our memories.

But magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses.

It is not easy to watch the world change around you. To see an entire way of life change and change and change again. It isn't easy to watch friends grown old and die, nor is it easy to be constantly moving on from place to place before people begin to wonder why you never age.

Why would anyone want to feel pain or fear?" Josh wondered aloud, both intrigued and repelled by the very idea. It seemed somehow wrong. "So they can feel alive," Scatty said.

El día en que dejamos de aprender es el día en que morimos.

Vijftieneneenhalf,' zei Dora hoofdschuddend. 'Zo ver kan ik niet terugdenken... Kun jij je nog iets herinneren van toen je vijftien was?' 'Levendig,' zei Scatty bars. 'Was dat niet zo ongeveer toen ik u in Babylon heb opgezocht en u hebt geprobeerd me aan koning Neboekadzenar uit te huwelijken?' 'Volgens mij vergis je je,' zei Dora opgewekt. 'Ik geloof dat dat later was.

You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.

I think being a parent is the most challenging thing you do. That's why we're here. It's at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It's the ultimate experience because it questions everything about who you are. But it's difficult.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

To experience something, you must be alive, so we cannot personally experience death. Yet we know it is real because every one of the hundred billion people who lived before us is gone. That presents us with something of a paradox.

There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.

Programming is like sex one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

Emotion, a fundamental aspect of musical experience, is an important theme for this book. Charles Darwin taught us that emotion is something we share with animals. It is an inter-species umbilical cord back to Mother Nature.

Pilots sometimes called this "the 200th hour" – when you knew just enough, and were confident enough, to make your first really big fuck-up.

no matter what happened to him now, whatever became of what was left of humanity… nothing could take away his experiences of these last remarkable few weeks. Nothing could reverse, not really, the striking ways in which Wesley had grown. And nothing could erase the contributions he'd been able to make to the cause – finally, fumblingly, through sheer trial-and-error and dogged persistence. He'd been part of a great undertaking. And part of a team.