Quotes About Experience

And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique?

You have probably heard the saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Actually, there is another saying that is probably more accurate, but is not quite as well known: 'The quickest way to become an old dog is to quit learning new tricks.

Anything, I eventually learned, is preferable to war; but that knowledge is something every man must learn for himself—usually at considerable expense.

with the Piedmont PD. He didn't talk about the war much, but he'd been in some shit, Hanson could tell. "Hanson, you got some kind of death wish. You're

Don't you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don't act like it. I don't intend to. It doesn't do much good, does it?

You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.

FORTY YEARS AGO

Somebody who would go to Italy with you and get up on a Saturday morning and take you up in the mountains and get snowed on and come home and be filled up with it all.

But when didn't a lifetime feel unfinished?

And that's maybe a better description of the experience of reading the Federalist Papers now, if you're reading them for guidance through a modern crisis. The predictions of the Framers of the Constitution were accurate for a time, but history diverged from their path a while back.

When ye've lived as long as I have, ye realize how relative time is. I've endured centuries that passed in the blink of an eye as if I were barely breathing.' He stopped and faced her. 'Or I can experience an entire lifetime in the span of a few nights. All the hope and passion that makes life worth living, 'tis suddenly surrounding me like a gift from God.' (Angus MacKay)

In fact, with experience and maturity we learn to worry less about others' intent and more about the effect others' actions are having on us. No longer are we in the game of rooting out unhealthy motives. And here's the good news. When we reflect on alternative motives, not only do we soften our emotions, but equally important, we relax our absolute certainty long enough to allow for dialogue— the only reliable way of discovering others' genuine motives.

But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

Most people seemed to think that you fell asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse — you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep.

Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step?

Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.

It was interesting, how much of adult life consisted of pretending.

I haven't had a perfect life...but I have had a perfectly good life!

Every experience is a potential life lesson. Even if you don't appreciate it at the time, each struggle in the present is preparing you for something else in the future.

Words aren't wasted, but sometimes they're just practice.

Our scars tell stories of who we are and what we did. A person without marks hasn't done anything.

So, I've decided to take him down to the tavern where he can meet real people and hear real adventures. That'll cure him of that fairy-tale nonsense before it sets in too deeply. (I'm no stranger to nonsense, having done plenty of it over the course of my own life, but at least I know the difference.)

Because of the workings of karmic memory, the same fear and doubt had to return and yet her response to that experience had to be very different in order to overcome it. In

It was a rare thing for someone in his position to see what death was, not in the instant but in the aftermath, where all its energies were absorbed.