Quotes About Experience

Non è cosa da poco dover ricominciare la propria vita a cinquantasette anni; e quando un uomo non dispone di altre carte che il cervello che ha nella testa e la lingua che ha nella bocca, deve pensarci bene prima di decidersi ad aprire quella bocca e parlare.

Quando hai vissuto a lungo come me tendi a pensare di aver ascoltato di tutto, di non poterti più stupire di nulla. Ti viene pure voglia di vantarti della tua esperienza del mondo e poi, ogni tanto, ti ritrovi di fronte a qualcosa che ti catapulta fuori dal bozzolo di goduta superiorità, ricordandoti da capo che della vita non capisci un bel niente.

Pour employer une expression qui m'a toujours plu, j'ai découvert que je vivais des jours empruntés.

B?röm az illanó érzetek palimpszesztje lett, és minden réteg annak a nyomát viselte, aki voltam.

Die Welt ist in meinem Kopf. Mein Körper ist in der Welt.

Angesichts der Schwierigkeiten, vor die uns die reale Welt stellte, war es wohl ganz verständlich, daß wir ihr so oft es ging den Rücken kehrten.

a lire belongs only to the person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live.

Hikayeler ancak onlar? anlatmas?n? bilenlerin ba??na gelirler.

Ferguson closed his eyes, paused for a long moment, and then turned to her and said: The best thing about being fifteen is that you don't have to be fifteen for more than a year.

Pensi che a te non succederà mai, che non ti può succedere, che sei l'unica persona al mondo in cui queste cose non succederanno mai e poi, a una a una, cominciano a succederti tutte, esattamente come succedono a tutti gli altri.

One, mentioned in a 2017 Economist article, felt "sharper, more aware of what [the] body needs" on 1P-LSD,

I wasn't fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn't punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn't loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment.

That there's something about the craziness that he had to go through that's kept me relatively sane.

If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher.

If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher.

And so one of the joys of immersing yourself in certain activities, such as hard exercise or a difficult puzzle or being whipped, is that you lose the feeling of being conscious of yourself. You just are.

Gopnik compares baby consciousness to that of an adult dumped into the middle of a foreign city, totally overwhelmed, constantly turning to see new things, struggling to make sense of it all. Things are even worse for a baby, actually, because even the most stressed-out adult can choose to think of something else: we can look forward to getting back to the hotel; imagine how we would describe our trip to friends; fantasize, daydream, or pray. The baby just is, trapped in the here and now.

the idea that you can't truly understand something without having experienced it yourself.

Most relevant for the purposes here, one lucky accident of this feature of memory is that pain-then-pleasure is recalled as better than pleasure-then-pain. Because of this, even if the amount of pain, taken in isolation, is the same as the amount of pleasure, if the pain comes first, the distortions of memory decrease the pain and increase the pleasure, improving the whole experience.

Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth.

The duration of felt experience—our feeling of right now—is between two and three seconds, about how long it takes Paul McCartney to sing the words "Hey Jude." Everything before this is memory; everything after is anticipation. So what about a life dedicated entirely to improving this moving window of two to three seconds?

Jeanne Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "What constitutes a good life? . . . Flow research has yielded one answer, providing an understanding of experiences during which individuals are fully involved in the present moment. Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does" (italics theirs). But this is actually a poor answer to the question of what constitutes a good life. Flow can be trivial.

Kahneman: Altogether, I don't think that people maximize happiness in that sense. And that's one of the reasons that I actually left the field of happiness, in that I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn't seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.

chosen suffering can generate and enhance pleasure, and that it is an essential part of meaningful activities and a meaningful life. And it's often the right thing to do. I'll repeat the quote from Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth." Sometimes pain is a proper acknowledgment of value.