Quotes About Experience

'Tango' was a good experience, looking back on it, and it seems to hold up pretty well.

I had to do a tango with Raft and I learned to dance in ballet shoes with my knees bent.

Honestly, I don't really know the rules of tango!

I was fresh from college and worked with my mum and even freelanced on my own with her team of people. I was young and had to face all kinds of tantrums from my clients. I was not disheartened.

Life is what we see

Life seemed suddenly a little empty, for never again could there happen to her something so dangerous, so sublime.

Being shot at is so unlike what one expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to have the appropriate emotions, the first few times.

It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.

The state of waking sleep, therefore, is a condition in which you unconsciously deprive yourself of the expansive vistas of sensory experience. Your sensory receptors become prematurely, but not irrevocably, dull simply because you aren't stimulating them enough.

I determined to learn to pray so that my experience conforms to the words of Jesus rather than try to make his words conform to my impoverished experience.

Much later, I discovered Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's wonderful remark about Experience and Nature: "Although Dewey's book is incredibly ill-written, it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.

Rorty is just as dismissive of James's many references to 'experience' – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty's pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.

I]f we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole preferred – there is no other truthful word – as one's best working attitude. (James 1977, pp. 14–15)

Thomas Merton says, "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!"2

Remember that the key to the Discipline of study is not reading many books, but experiencing what we do read.

Darkness is a definite experience of prayer. It is to be expected, even embraced.

Jesus did not all of a sudden one day start spouting nice sayings about God. No, when he began his public ministry, he was speaking out of a life that had been tested and tried.

To worship is to experience Reality, to touch Life. It is to know, to feel, to experience the resurrected Christ in the midst of the gathered community. It is a breaking into the Shekinah of God, or better yet, being invaded by the Shekinah of God.* God

As Thomas Merton says, "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!"2 Psalm

One time, your heart almost slipped away on a river barge. Your hands seemed to claw the sky. I'm sorry. No one else made anything out of those streaked clouds. The fact that it happened is proof enough for me.

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves and burn your fingers once again.

All these scars. The road map of my life. My armor.

Everyone in California is a Buddhist for fifteen minutes. Then they realize they're not allowed to eat chili dogs and enlightenment starts sounding like a real drag.

So far, being dead is about as much fun as a barbed-wire G-string. Yes, there is such a thing. They invented it in Hell, which is where I am. I already said I was dead. Where else would I be? Try to keep up.