Quotes About Experience

The body of reality is always richer than the mere outline sketch we call principles.

I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.

the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by "understanding" it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.

Imagine how well you would drive if after taking your driving test you bought a car and parked in your driveway only to drive in emergencies!

they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.

Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?

We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life. That

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.

We never know what we have lost, or what we have found. We are only ourselves, and that promise. Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

But what;s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought-- occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like-- because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought-- occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like-- because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

Eliade once said in my hearing that the highest human being was the mystic, since he could actually perceive and experience ultimate timeless reality; the second highest was the poet, who could at least express what the mystic saw in adequate language; the third was the historian of religion like himself, who could only record the seeings and the words of the mystic and his poet.

From the viewpoint of the soul, no event or course of action is "bad." All is simply experience, and every experience teaches and offers seeds of growth.

The primary role of sex is to [help you] remember that you are Spirits, to share an ever-increasing experience of creation itself. Human love is only a small part of All There Is, and All There Is is Love. There's nothing else. So, when you're in the body

Cuando tú, como alma eterna, planeaste tu vida actual, no te preocupaste por los conocimientos que podría adquirir tu mente. En lugar de eso, querías experimentar los sentimientos que generaría una vida en la dimensión física.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

I'm getting older everyday, you know. I'm not like a fine wine that just gets better with age. I'm more like a good strong cheese. I can only be aged so long before I start to stink.

If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.

Know this, and know it well: time is never wasted. Wherever we go, whatever we do, everything is an aspect of education. Even when we don't immediately grasp the lesson.

That is no country for old men, he thought.

The only place where he revealed the other Oliver, the machine-Oliver, was when it came to drugs. Second week on campus I scored some groovy Moroccan hash and he absolutely wouldn't. Told me that he'd spend 17½ years calibrating his head properly and he wasn't about to let it get messed up now.