Quotes About Experience

It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.

That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness

Robert M. Pirsig

I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

De hellingen van de berg dragen het leven, niet de top.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well. In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

So we move down the empty road. I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road.

The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.

Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.

Most child behavioral development research is implicitly stage oriented, concerning: (a) the sequence with which stages emerge; (b) how experience influences the speed and surety with which that sequential tape of maturation unreels; and (c) how this helps create the adult a child ultimately becomes.

Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It's cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory cortex in the triangle player in the orchestra. But at the other end, it's disastrous that trauma enlarges the amygdala and atrophies the hippocampus, crippling those with PTSD. Similarly, expanding the amount of motor cortex devoted to finger dexterity is great in neurosurgeons but

A vida adulta está cheia de encruzilhadas significativas nas quais fazer a coisa certa é sem dúvida mais complicado. Conduzir-se a contento por esse caminho faz parte do portfólio do córtex frontal, e desenvolver as habilidades necessárias para fazer isso de maneira correta requer um profundo aprimoramento por meio da experiência.

I knew I couldn't sleep with her. I don't know - in my small experience of women, I've found it to hard to sleep with them at such times. Times when you get impression that there's more to them than an opportunity. Sleeping with girls was great, sleeping with people was a bit more complicated. Maybe it was a bad thing, maybe a sign of my immaturity, but I knew that there was some kind of tenderness in it as well.

I am not ashamed that I was once a vacuum-cleaner salesman, only that I was a *good* vacuum-cleaner salesman.

Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren.

Jeder Mensch kommt auf die Welt mit Kräften für die unerhörtesten Erlebnisse. Die Gesetze binden ihn nicht. Aber dann lässt ihn das Leben immer zwischen zwei Möglichkeiten wählen, und immer fühlt er: eine ist nicht darunter; immer eine, die unerfundene dritte Möglichkeit. Und man tut alles, was man will, und hat nie getan, was man gewollt hat. Schließlich wird man talentlos.

Und es gibt auch Dinge, wo zwischen Erleben und Erfassen diese Unvergleichkeit herrscht. Immer aber ist es so, dass das, was wir in einem Augenblick ungeteilt und ohne Fragen erleben, unverständlich und verwirrt wird, wenn wir es mit den Ketten der Gedanken zu unserem bleibenden Besitze fesseln wollen. Und was groß und menscenfremd aussieht, solange unsere Worte von ferne danach langen, wird einfach und verliert das Beunruhigende, sobald es in den Tatkreis unseres Lebens eintritt.

Versuch, das Erlebnis zu halten, zu fixieren, schlägt fehl. Die Absolutheit ist nicht zu bewahren. Ich schliesse daran, die Welt kann nicht ohne Böse bestehen, es bringt Bewegung in die Welt. Das Gute allein bewirkt Starre.

Sonderbarerweise sprechen wir oft davon, aber es ist gerade [grenzenloses Empfinden], was wir lebenslang vermeiden.