Quotes About Experience

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured.

But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.

Very little of the high Sierra makes it into its images. If you see a pretty photo from the Sierras, you always have to remember, it was a zillion times more beautiful than that!

A mammal never forgets a hurt;

Something strange happened to me out there in the desert; I don't know what.

This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.

We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.

However, recall that every human lives under pressure. Every human feels various kinds of stress. Then things happen." Badim

Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one's surroundings and one's reactions, and one's thoughts.

Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body. Now

I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel.

Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. "Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o'clock; cold and shabby at six.

Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it's catch-as-catch-can.

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring — that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

I was old the day I was born and I'll be young the day I die.

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don't you?

People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they're first learning it, and then when they've known it forever.

Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. "Just keep learning," the old woman said.

When you have sex with someone, you willingly give them a part of your soul that you can never get back.

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.

A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.

Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting.

I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.