Quotes About Experience

To quote a Shakespearean cliché, repeated to death because it is so stubbornly true: "All the world's a stage." Work is theater. The place where life unfolds to our tragic or comic satisfaction.

What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside can seem more like a constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others because they reside in a far too private chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, but often the opposite, to have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe, even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.

those who can most truly be accounted brave are those who best know the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then go out, undeterred, to meet what is to come. —PERICLES

A final word: I am not knowledgeable about the internet. I do not have a computer. I guess that at 74 years of age, I don't have the patience to learn.

Before you've practiced, the theory is useless. After you've practiced, the theory is obvious.

It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.

My tongue tasted like a gladiator's jockstrap [Marcus Corvinus after a night out]

Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

We do not experience things as they really are! We experience things only through a filter and that filter determines what information will enter our awareness and what will be rejected. If we change the filter (our belief system), then we automatically experience the world in a completely different way.

And, well, that's my story," I said. "I'm sorry that it's so, you know. Retarded.

Of all the dogs I've known in my life, I've never seen a better driver.

I was about to warn the girl about John's coffee, which tasted like a cup of battery acid someone had pissed in and then cursed at for several hours, but John turned to her and in a lawyerly voice said, "Shelly, tell us your story.

I said before that my skin was "on fire" with the pain but being confronted so soon after that sentiment with the actual experience, I admit that other thing was nothing like my skin actually being on fire.

I closed my eyes and let out a breath that smelled like I'd eaten an entire wet dog and washed it down with sweat wrung from a hobo's undershirt.

THEY SAY LOS Angeles is like The Wizard of Oz. One minute it's small-town monochrome neighborhoods and then boom—all of a sudden you're in a sprawling Technicolor freak show, dense with midgets. Unfortunately, this story does not take place in Los Angeles.

Anyway, it's two in the morning and we're taking turns pissing off of the tower (rather than going at the same time, because we weren't raised by wolves). So it's my turn and I'm right at that transcendent moment when the long stream of urine connects me and the ground below...

If you've actually seen a ghost—and I assure you that you probably have, within the last month—it would have just looked like any real, solid person. It's likely nobody saw that person but you and no, you can't photograph them. You're not seeing them with your eyes.

She wasn't some little princess from the suburbs who just graduated college with a humanities degree, she knew what people were really like.

you had wired-up glasses, you could overlay your view with their feed—literally see the world through their eyes, blotting out your own reality completely.

It would have been a good occasion to smoke a pipe had I owned one and had I been forty years older.

College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?

We understand at some level why combat veterans shrink from sharing their stories: we don't want to know them. In our sometimes-frenzied veneration of war heroes, we are too eager to rush past the shadowed doorway where lurks what the poet Peter Marin calls "the terrible and demanding wisdom" of war.

Time is the thing that everyone knows intimately – until you ask them to tell you about It.

Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise