Quotes About Experience

there are many things about yourself you just can't learn while sitting on your bum. Everyday life offers few opportunities to check out your capacity for bravery in the face of death or your tolerance for extreme physical challenges. If you want to know this about yourself, to test your mettle, activities such as mountain climbing seem like just the thing.

We scream when we are in pain. But, weirdly, we also scream for the opposite of pain—intense pleasure, joyous surprise, great excitement. Have you seen the videos of fangirls in the sixties in the presence of the Beatles? They positively shriek. Crying is also triggered by opposites. You might cry on the worst day of your life and on the best. Weddings and funerals; the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

benign masochism refers to the choice to pursue activities that are normally painful or unpleasant but not harmful.

life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens... Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, 'Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.' This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

It turns out, then, that if you think something is really going to hurt and it hurts just mildly, the magic of contrast can cause this mild hurt to transform into pleasure.

Choosing to experience pain to enhance subsequent pleasure is a powerful trick, but it only works some of the time.

WE'VE BEEN TALKING about meaningful pursuits, but there are meaningful experiences as well. Here the bar is dropped somewhat. These can be more passive and don't necessarily involve achieving a goal. What seems to be key here is that they will change you in some way.

THIS BRAIN-AS-MUSCLE THEORY captures everyday experience in an elegant way. But it has some serious limitations. The claim about glucose is the weakest part

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.

Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as "pain" occurs in the mind.

Few experiences in life are more universal than pain, which flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life. I

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.

If this interior experience was possible in the twentieth century b.c. it is also possible in the twentieth century a.d. The fundamental nature of man has not changed during the interval.

Experience shows that if a sufficiently deep level--not necessarily the deepest level but one that corresponds to what the yogis call savikalpa samadhi, which is not as deep as nirvikalpa--if that can be attained and then prolonged sufficiently in time, an artist or a writer can draw from the experience creative power for his work.

He must become an apprentice to ordinary life.

While thus the Devil, having profited by experience, always insists upon having his rights insured by an unequivocal instrument (which in later centuries is signed with blood); he, in his turn, is fearlessly trusted to keep his promise, and this is a fact which must be mentioned to his honor, for although he is said to be a liar from the beginning, not one case is known, in all devil-lore in which the Devil attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

miracles. My generation grew up through such a period, between

Most people would be full of questions," said the youth. "It's the nature of innocence to question, the nature of duty to accept." "And it's the nature of age to be too sure of itself.

An unexpected benefit of my career in biochemistry has been travel.

Teachers make a staggering number of decisions—some historical research suggests as many as 800 per day (Jackson, 1968). And no one helps you make the decisions; you're essentially on your own. As you acquire knowledge and experience, however, you learn to make these decisions routinely and efficiently (Berliner, 1994, 2000).

you never just suffer the thing that you're suffering, but you always also suffer the way that you're suffering that thing.

I want to get you to think about and finally find comfort in the fact that our experience of suffering is never just physical. The pain that stops us in our tracks, that makes us want to pull the covers over our head and not face the day, and at moments makes us wish that we could die, is never just physical.